MPO Technical Committee Meeting   11/17/2020

We'll read the pre-meeting statement and then I'll hand it over to Rory.

So the MPO tech committee is meeting today, November 17th at 10 AM with a quorum of voting members through electronic virtual communication of Zoom software application.

The meeting agenda and virtual meeting address have been posted for one week at 401 Water Street East on the TJPDC website and provided to local media outlets and provided to the general public and MPO tech members contemporaneously.

This meeting is open to public viewing and public comment will be allowed through electronic communication at such time as provided on the meeting agenda.

As a public body, the TJPDC is allowed to meet utilizing virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01 of the Virginia State Budget HB 29.

Item 4.0-01 allows public bodies to meet through electronic communication means during emergency declarations such as the current COVID-19 emergency.

The governor has declared a state of emergency.

The nature of this declared emergency makes it impractical or unsafe for the public body to assemble in a single location.

The purpose of meeting is to discuss or transact the business statutorily required or necessary to continue operations of the public body.

The TJPDC shall make available a recording of the meeting on its website in accordance with the timeframes established in 2.2-3707 and 2.2-3707.1 of the Code of Virginia.

The nature of the emergency, the fact that the meeting was held by electronic communication means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held, shall be stated in the meetings of the public body.

We will, or in the minutes of the public body, we will begin by calling attendance of the MPO tech members and then TJPDC staff members.

We ask that you keep your communication devices on mute until you prepare to speak.

In addition, you may use the raise hand or chat feature to indicate that you would like to speak or ask a question and the host will call on you.

We ask that the public stay on mute except for the public comment periods to cut down on background noise.

Those wishing to speak during the hearings or public comment periods are asked to use the raise hand or chat function of the Zoom program to indicate that you would like to speak.

The meeting host will call your name and then you can unmute yourself and speak to the group.

If you prefer to speak using the chat feature, the host can read your comments to the group.

Great.

I will call this meeting to order.

I'll go ahead and do that.

I'm just going to go through the list on my my participant list.

So me, I'm Jessica Hirsch-Ballering.

I'm here.

Andrew, one of our guests is here.

Steven Johnson.

Here.

Steven Reed, one of our guests.

Chris is one of our guests.

Lucinda Shannon.

Here.

Julian Bivens.

Here.

Oh, he is.

OK, great.

Sounded like a very familiar name.

OK, Jeanette Janicek.

Here.

Julian Bivens.

Patrick Clark.

Here.

Also a member.

I am not.

I'm a representative from UVA parking and transportation here.

Great.

Well, thank you for joining us today.

People just keep moving around.

Samuel Hayes?

Hi, Sam.

Sarah Pennington?

Here.

Wood Hudson?

I see Wood is here.

Just appears to be on mute.

Is there anyone I missed?

OK, great.

Well, that completes attendance.

All right.

Well, first up is matters from the public.

There's a limit of three minutes per speaker.

Members of the public are welcome to provide comments on any public interest transportation related topic, including the items on the agenda.

Again, three minutes per speaker.

Is there anyone who'd like to speak?

Andy.

Take that as a no.

And again, there's an additional matter from the public at the end, so feel free to speak then.

Next up on the agenda is approval of the September 15th draft meeting minutes.

Does anyone have any edits to make?

Sorry.

All right.

Do we have a motion to approve the minutes with that modification?

So moved.

We have a motion.

We have a second?

Second?

Anybody?

All right, great.

So we have a motion and a second.

All in favor, say aye.

All opposed, say nay.

None opposed.

Motion carries.

Minutes are approved.

Next up on the agenda, we have Transportation Performance Management and Performance-Based Planning and Programming.

All right.

Thank you, Rory.

I'm going to pull up the presentation.

All right.

Can everyone see that kind of full screen now?

Great.

Okay.

So good morning.

My name is Andrew Pike.

I'm a program analyst at the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment.

Appreciate the opportunity to be with you this morning to talk about transportation performance management and performance-based planning and programming.

Agenda for this presentation, just talk briefly about who is OIP and what do we do, high-level discussion about performance-based planning and programming, and then get into some details around transportation performance management.

some of the details on the federal process, looking at state and Charlottesville, Albemarle performance, and then getting into kind of next steps in this federal process.

So what is OIP?

Some of this may be familiar to you, some of it may not.

OIP is Virginia's Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment.

It's been around for 18 years now.

We recently in 2018 staffed up to 12

Full-time staff and we're responsible for covering three major program areas.

First of which is the Commonwealth Long-Range Transportation Plan, so my colleague Chris Wishman is here today to talk about that a little bit later.

We're also responsible for project prioritization processes like smart scale.

And then the area where I work is performance management.

So we work across the Transportation Secretariat, primarily working with VDOT and DRPT.

and then we work with other planning partners like MPOs and PDCs, localities and FHWA.

So our role in performance management, myself and two other colleagues, we're working on a number of priorities.

The most relevant of which today is the federal framework for transportation performance management and performance-based planning and programming.

We're continuing to implement that.

We're also working on new performance measures

and data-driven target setting methodologies that build on that federal framework.

And then we're using performance trends and data to inform investment and policy decisions.

And a longer term effort is building a data sharing platform with reporting and analytical tools so that we can provide transportation performance data to planning partners like MPOs and PDCs and others in a more accessible fashion.

So to get into the meat of the performance of this presentation, I wanted to give a high level look at performance-based planning and programming and what it is when we say that term.

So we've kind of translated that performance-based planning and programming into plan, invest, and manage, and that this process is utilizing data to inform planning, investing, and managing.

So thinking about planning, we plan at different timescales, different geographic scales as well.

And those plans inform investment decisions, such as in smart scale or HSIF, the merit process, other state funding programs.

And then we evaluate that performance by looking at data, looking at trends, comparing performance to actual

comparing performance targets to actual performance.

So we hope that this is kind of a virtuous cycle where you look back by monitoring performance of your investments.

You take that information, you determine what's working, what's not working, where you're seeing improvement, and you feed that into future planning efforts in order to then inform future investment strategies and programs so that you're hopefully continually improving

and the Transportation Network.

Kind of what does performance-based planning and programming look like at the federal level?

This all flows out of federal legislation, MAP 21 and the FAST Act, where Congress set national goals around a few topics that I'm going to do on the next slide.

And those goals are really to try to capture

Are all the investments that the federal government is making in surface transportation, are we seeing meaningful change?

Are we making improvement on a number of categories?

So the Federal Highway Administration and Transit Administration established performance measures as a result of this legislation.

And then states and MPOs are then required to establish targets for these measures, which I'll discuss shortly.

And then as part of that performance-based planning and programming cycle,

who incorporate the performance targets and results into long range plans and into transportation improvement programs.

And so it's all about utilizing performance data to inform planning and investment decisions.

These federal processes really just set a foundation for utilizing data-driven approaches to planning and investing.

There are requirements for setting targets for these.

States and MPOs are not required to use federal measures to

prioritized their investments.

They're just required to set targets and report out on these measures and results.

So like I said, transportation performance management flows out of federal legislation, setting goals and performance measures for safety, asset condition, system performance, transit asset management, and public transit agency safety plans, all focused on asset condition, so bridge and pavement condition, and then system performance

which is essentially a reliability on the interstate, not interstate, NHS.

At the state level, the Commonwealth Transportation Board is responsible for setting targets for these areas.

And so that's been done beginning in 2018.

So just kind of capturing where we are now, it's a lot of background information on performance-based planning and programming and transportation performance management.

Where are we now?

States and MPOs.

So Virginia, OIP, and VDOT have worked with MPOs to establish two and four year targets.

The state is required to set two year and four year targets.

MPOs only have to set four year targets.

And we're in the midst, right in the middle of the first performance period, 2018 to 2021.

And we just recently, at the state level, submitted a midterm report that detailed

where we are.

Are we making progress on the measures that FHWA is monitoring us on?

And we're at a period now where we can adjust targets.

And the state has taken action to adjust one target, which I'll discuss.

And MPOs now also have the opportunity to adjust targets for the federal performance measures.

So when I get into

what those measures are and then show you a little bit of state performance and Charlottesville, Albemarle performance.

So starting with pavement condition, you can see that state and Charlottesville, Albemarle have set the same targets for pavement in good condition on the interstate and pavement in poor condition.

And you can see that we're meeting those targets at both the state and regional levels.

And sticking with payment condition, looking at the non-understate NHS, the state and Campo are sharing the same targets here as well.

And performance is meeting the targets in this area.

And so I should have said 2017 is the baseline data year.

And then we've got 2018 and 2019 numbers to look at.

So we have three years of data right now.

for the federal measures.

And then looking at bridge performance, bridge condition.

This is an area you'll see there's an asterisk here for that first measure, the deck area of NHS bridges.

So that's the National Highway System.

The state took action this fall to adjust that target down to 30.5.

And that's due to a number of factors, beginning with some errors in the original baseline data.

due to the fact that the state has to report out on bridges that we don't actually manage.

So they're federal bridges that are maintained by, you know, the Park Service or the Forest Service or DOD and then their border bridges, which we don't fully maintain that are accounted for in our performance metrics.

So we've, we've taken that down to 35, 30.5% and feel like we'll continue to meet that at the four year mark.

You'll see that the state and camp will have different targets.

Each MPO has the opportunity to set targets for its own region or adapt the state targets.

So this is an instance where your MPO chose to set its own targets.

You'll see that there's a little bit of a challenge in meeting those at this point.

And that's, again, an opportunity for the MPO to consider whether to adjust those targets

Set new targets for the region or adopt the state targets.

And that's an action that I'll speak to a little bit later.

Now moving into reliability.

So this is, you know, trying to get at how reliable is your trip on the interstate or the non-interstate NHS.

And you'll see that reliability on the, on the interstate and the non-interstate NHS in your region probably

No surprise, very reliable.

We've seen some improvement at the state level as well on these measures.

And the final measure that I'll speak to today is truck travel times.

And this is really focused on freight reliability and trying to help trucking industry plan in terms of on-time delivery.

So this measure is an index.

It's looking at

Kind of the most extreme travel time, the 95th percentile travel time, somewhere we're having kind of really huge spikes in travel time, comparing that to an average in the 50th percentile travel time.

So you'll see that we're kind of jumping around at the state level, while we're seeing a little upward movement in that number, a higher number represents lower reliability.

So we're kind of jumping around at the state level,

You know, we'll see 2020 as an elemental will kind of be a major outlier for a lot of these measures.

And that we'll just have to kind of work through what the data looks like and communicate the results once we have that data.

So current activities around transportation performance management for MPOs every MPO

has the opportunity to adjust targets.

Some MPOs have the opportunity to adjust more since they've set their own.

So your MPO has the opportunity to adjust those bridge condition targets and then reliability targets.

Other MPOs in the state which adopted just the state targets only have the option to adjust one of the targets, which is that one that the state adjusted.

So this information has been presented previously at MPO quarterly coordination meetings.

It's also available on the outside MeDOT site and adjustments to any targets need to be made and documented to OAP and MeDOT by March 15th of 2021.

Another current activity in this arena is establishing safety targets.

Steven Reed is here to discuss that process.

and then kind of going beyond the measures, what other, how does that, how do performance measures and targets and monitoring conditions, how does that feed into other processes?

So the measures and the targets that are set have to be, are to be included in the TIP and then the long range plan.

And that's to really get into that performance-based planning and programming cycle, right?

So you're sending these measures and targets

You're looking at them as you're determining investments in the tip and then you're monitoring performance in the long range plan as well and reporting out on how the MPO is doing.

And with that, I think I've breezed through it maybe more quickly than I had planned.

I meant to say at the beginning that you could have felt free to stop me with questions, but

Now is a good time for questions as well.

I have a question.

So what's, I remember we did this once, but what's the process for, for the, for the local jurisdiction sort of break or establishing its own

Right.

So how would the Charlottesville, Albemarle MPO set its own targets for its region?

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

So the process really I'll start just kind of procedurally and then go from there.

So procedurally each MPO has until March 15th of 2021 to

adjust any targets.

Charlottesville, Albemarle region has the opportunity to adjust targets that it set for the region back in 2018.

So Campos set targets of its own for bridge condition, and then also for those reliability measures, both the highway one and the freight one.

So those are five distinct measures.

that you all can revisit over the next few months and make a determination whether based on those three, and we just have three years of data, look at the trends and make a determination on whether an adjustment is necessary.

Got a question.

Sorry, if I'm moving a little slow this morning, but my takeaway was that when the phrase performance based here, when the phrase performance based is used here, it sounds like it's referring more to performance of the state of good repair of the infrastructure rather than throughput or efficiency or design elements.

It's more engineering based.

Yeah, there's really, that's a good way to

Distinguishing, yeah, there's a set of measures that's specific to essentially standard repair asset condition for pavement and ridges.

And then there's a set of measures that's focused on what the federal, what FHWA groups as system performance.

So that's those reliability measures.

So yeah, it's really just the asset condition.

and system performance.

Is there somewhere I can go to learn more about those reliability measures?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I'm happy to, I can follow up with Lucinda and send her some information.

Okay.

Great.

Yeah.

Our colleagues, some of Steven,

Steven's colleagues, Mita Lapwood, Sunita Lahiri Avidat are subject matter experts on reliability.

They actually gave a really great and in-depth presentation on reliability measures, probably about a few weeks ago.

That'd be great.

So I'm hoping that I'll send you guys, I have some workbooks with the data for our region and then it shows the state trends and then our MPO trends and I'm hoping

Through this meeting, and maybe our next meeting, we'll be able to, or you all will be able to make a recommendation to the MPO Policy Board.

They will be voting on this in their January meeting.

So their upcoming December 1st meeting, we're going to have Andrew, we'll have similar presentations to the ones that you're having today.

And the hope is that through the MPO committees, we'll

kind of decide what targets we want to adopt the state targets or if we want to change the targets and set our own and what those would be.

Currently, we've got the staff here from OPI to kind of answer questions and I'll send out some more material and then we can discuss this at our next meeting as well.

But I'm hoping that

Yeah, that sounds great.

And one thing I'd like to hear a little bit more about

is where we are on that deck area of NHS.

We're doing NHS's National Highway System, Bridges in Good Condition, where we are just woefully short of target.

I'd like to understand why that is and how we really foresee ourselves getting anywhere close to even the lower target we set for ourselves.

And whether deck area is a good measure in the first place, right?

It seems to me, if we have a crumbling Belmont Bridge and we were to replace it with, say, a one-lane bridge in each direction, which we're not going to do, but the roads on either side are one lane, you're kind of almost hurting yourself in that

in that exchange, right?

Because the deck area you would add at the end, which would presumably be in good condition because it's new, would be lower, right?

And count less against all the other shoddy condition bridges in the district.

Yeah, the use of deck area can definitely skew things.

You can have very large bridges that are in fair or poor condition.

Not good condition that can just kind of skew those numbers.

You could have very few in terms of bridges in account of structures.

There's definitely a discrepancy between the count of structures in a category versus the deck area.

So for example, in the Fredericksburg district, the construction district, the VDOT construction district has a number of large bridges that

were in poor condition that are being replaced.

And so that metric looked particularly troubling, right?

If you're looking at it, when you step back and consider the improvements that are planned in that district, you understand that's just kind of a short term blip and that those numbers won't go down and there'll be an increase in good percentage based on new construction.

And like Lucinda mentioned, there are,

There are workbooks available that have data, condition data by individual structure.

It's sortable by MPO.

So you can take a look at that information.

So I do have that slide that, Andrew, you've been helping me with, that shows kind of a summary of the performance targets.

And then it has the MPO target, the state target, and then the kind of the predicted targets for the conditions for 2021, if we want to pull that up.

Can I ask a quick question on this also?

Or maybe I think this may be more of a comment, but if you give some direction on how to address this.

So in the county, I mean, we don't really have any control over addressing issues like bridge condition.

I mean, we rely 100% on VDOT.

for doing that.

And honestly, every time we do move through bridges, we're getting them repaired or replaced in time.

It tends to take about four or five years from when that project is identified until it's actually completed.

So I think that's something we need to keep in mind as we're

as we're looking at this.

But I don't understand, and maybe this is related to how Charlottesville handles their bridge repair and replacement more than Albemarle County, but why we would have something different from the state targets if we have to rely entirely on the state for

for addressing those issues.

I don't think we can even recommend bridges that we want to get replaced.

It's really entirely done at the state level.

And we're just told these are the ones that we're moving forward with.

Yeah, it's a really great point that this is obviously a national framework, right?

And we all know that Virginia is a large DOT and maintains so much of the network.

And we're talking specifically, when we're talking about these federal measures, we're only talking about the National Highway System.

And for bridge and pavement, that's just 15% of what VDOT maintains.

So there really is,

It's an important consideration, right?

Thanks.

Hey, Kevin, this is Chuck.

The reason why we went different last time

with the original target measures where there were several projects, bridge resurfacing projects that are in the city that were going to address some of our critical bridges in the MPO area.

And we felt that once those were done, the improved, those bridges would come off our list.

So it would drastically increase our

are reduced on the number of bridges we had in the lower criteria.

And that's why we went with a different target than the state targets before.

Okay, thanks.

Yeah, those bridges were programmed for SJR resurfacing.

And it's just, once those are done, those deficiencies should come off.

and those bridges should go back to a fair good condition.

And I think there were like the Rugby Road Bridge.

I think there were bridges mainly on 250 over railroad tracks and over Rugby Road, Ivy Road.

And so have those already been replaced and so they'll show up as an improvement in our four categorized deck area now or are those near term?

Okay.

Do we have any other questions or is that slide ready?

Yeah, the point that Kevin was making was actually what I was trying to

It's that a lot of the, for instance, the interstate roads and a number of the roads which come through time reliability, the county doesn't have any, any means in which to improve or to advance that we don't have those funds.

We don't control the funds and we don't currently control the assets to do that.

And so I guess at some point, unless the city is prepared to

to sort of move something or the other members of the MPO, but most of the other members in the MPO are similarly situated as the county.

I don't know why we would vary, would there be any variation from what the state is proposing since it's the state or the Commonwealth that's going to drive the solution whenever a solution is put in place.

So that's the piece that I was wrestling with through this whole, while I was reading this and also the one after this is like, well, this is really wonderful, but we don't own the assets.

We don't control the assets.

And Kevin, if you get Kevin that magic bag of tricks, yeah, he could fix it, but he doesn't have those magic bags of tricks.

He has to come and persuade people to sort of do this.

And it's down in Compton and Richmond.

So that's really sort of what I was trying to get at and what I'm still trying to get at when we move to the next one.

It's like, okay, this is really interesting, but you're asking us to adopt a performance metrics or performance standards.

Yeah, and I guess, you know, to jump off that, you know, my big question is what is it, what are the actual practical implications of setting up performance metric here?

You know, if we adopt a performance metric that says we don't need as much deck area in good condition, does that mean, especially in the county, is VDOT not going to bother to improve the deck area of those bridges?

or if we say, well, we want, you know, only 1% in poor condition, are we going to get more resources?

Right, needs, yeah, so it's a, right, it's a federal requirement to set these targets both in the state and the MPO level.

And then you're right that, you know, the target of the campo sets for bridges in good condition, if you set it at, or for poor condition, if you set it at 1%,

I'm sorry, when you say how it would have an effect on how VDOT allocates resources, I mean, we all know that we're

But budgets are struggling right now at the state level and the local level if there were a push to reallocate resources to address things like

the improving the deck area of bridges or the others we see here like pavement condition.

That means it removes it from other things that we have been putting some local money on which is trying to construct new sidewalk and improve operations at highly congested intersections or something like that.

And we don't wanna do that either.

Yeah, so like I said earlier, the, sorry I'm getting a little echo, the federal targets are just, are just capturing the NHS, right?

And that's just 15% of what VDOT maintains for bridges and pavements.

So VDOT actually underwent a significant effort over the last couple of years in doing a comprehensive review of its maintenance and operations program.

And that effort

was finalized last December, December 2019, and formalized by CTB action for statewide targets for pavement condition, statewide targets for bridge condition.

And those are the targets, since they represent the entirety of the network, the interstate primary and secondary networks that VDOT maintains, those are the targets

The meet at is using allocated resources simply because they cover the entire network.

So just to reiterate, I think I heard you correctly.

So setting these targets doesn't change the allocation of resources.

Leaving feelings aside, you're right, it is done.

This is a federal requirement and it really is about pushing that performance-based planning and programming.

Thinking of a word for that template, right?

That process and trying to get MPOs and state DOTs, some of which may be not as advanced as, you know, Meda and Campo and other MPOs in Virginia.

to start pulling in performance data, to start setting targets for measures, using that information to inform planning and then inform investment decisions.

You're definitely seeing that at the state level, right?

Just mentioned the comprehensive review.

VTRANS is obviously a very data-driven process this go-around with setting measures that then identify means that can then be addressed.

via transportation funding programs like SmartScale.

So it's really about driving more towards that type of planning and programming approach.

Because there are no, you know, aside from setting targets, including this information in the SIP, including this information in the MPP and reporting out on it, those are the requirements for MPOs.

There are no penalties for MPOs.

State DOTs do have penalties if we allow payment in poor condition on the energy to exceed the level.

Same with percent of British deck area in poor condition.

And there are penalties on the safety side as well.

OK, thanks.

Yeah, sure.

And actually, Rory, what I was going to say is kind of what you were going to say.

It's kind of just an exercise.

It's required.

I think the one thing that we can feel good about with this is it starts a conversation and starts to bring awareness to our conditions and how they're changing and the trends that they're going along.

So while it doesn't

really matter financially what we decide to set the targets at.

It's a good opportunity for us to be aware of the conditions, the trends that they're going in, our goals and objectives along with the state and just kind of start having awareness of the data and where it's going.

So this slide here is kind of summarizes what is in the workbooks that I'll send out to you guys after this meeting.

I'm going to also try to get all this stuff on the website somewhere so it'll be easy to access.

So the

The lines, the rows that are in bold are the ones that we need to decide if we're going to reset or keep as they are.

They were changed.

They're different from the state.

So I guess I don't really have advice about where we should be on that, but we need to decide if we're going to stay with our current target or change it, update it.

for the lines in bold.

And so you can see the first column is our current target.

That's what we set it at in 2018.

And then we have the actual, so that's the actual number for 2019.

And then the state target is the third column.

Great.

So if no one else has any questions, I know we're a little long on time here.

So, Legenda, could you send this slide out by email?

And then I guess it's time for safety measures.

Thanks, Andrew.

All right.

It took me a minute to get the unmute button.

Hopefully you can see my PowerPoint slide screen and hear me okay.

Thumbs up.

Yep.

Okay, great.

Thanks for your time today.

I'm the safety planning manager, and we have a small group of three in traffic engineering in the central office that oversees collaboration with our stakeholders in safety.

So that obviously includes OIP, Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Health,

Association of Chiefs of Police and other stakeholders and all the ease of safety.

We work on a five year strategic highway safety plan, which is a federal requirement that we prepare.

And we're actually going into an update next year.

If you recall, you might've been around back in 2017, we were doing our update and we met at your offices.

when we did our last update.

So we have the strategic plan, which sets five year objectives that we view as sort of our optimistic objectives, where we want to go towards zero deaths and serious injuries.

We're also involved with our annual safety target setting at the statewide level and supporting the MPOs and setting those targets as well, which is what I'll talk about today.

and our group also oversees the safety scoring for smart scale.

So we're in the midst of doing that analysis for the 400 projects that were submitted in the smart scale for this round as well with a pretty large consultant team helping us out this time.

All right, so some background on the safety measures.

There are five of them.

I'll show those in the next slide.

established annually.

We have to do that in concert with our major partner, which is the so-called Designated Governor's Highway Safety Office.

And that is at DMV in Virginia.

And they partner with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on our behavioral side.

So our enforcement and education and encouragement

ease of safety.

And we have three of the five performance measures that overlap.

They have actually extra ones that are submitted that have more details.

I think there's 11 additional ones that they have.

They submit to NHTSA by June of each year for the next year.

And then we follow on and submit with our annual report to Federal Highways in August.

And then 180 days after that, we work with the MPOs to have those submitted to us for each of the regions.

So usually each September, we have an updated set of targets that we give at the quarterly meetings that are held in conjunction with OIPI.

And we work through setting those with each of the MPOs.

Just a recap on the safety performance measures.

There are three that are counts or frequencies, fatalities and serious injuries.

Serious injuries are recorded by the police officer as being severe and usually needing treatment and most often

They are removed from the scene by an ambulance.

They're ambulanced away.

And so that's where we get into working with our EMS partners on that golden hour of dealing with the injuries from a motor vehicle crash.

And then at the bottom is the other frequency-based number, which is non-motorized fatalities.

and serious injuries for that.

So in total, the fatalities is less than 1% of all of our crashes.

Our serious injuries are about 6% of our total crashes.

And so we're dealing with a very small number of crashes that result in those injuries.

And so when you look at that at the MPO level, you're getting at even smaller numbers, right?

than that.

And then our non-motorized fatalities are about an eighth of the total fatalities.

So that becomes an even smaller number when you look at fatalities at a regional level.

So for each of these, we are required to report and we are judged upon a five-year average of those numbers.

So we're looking

at the last five years.

Well, actually we can look at a number of last years to look at those five-year average trends in comparison to our annual numbers and how those trend lines are changing and being different.

And so with that, we had a really pivotal year in 2018, the first year that we had to by code work with the board to have

our targets approved by the Transportation Board.

And as you can see from this slide, we have the red dots are the annual numbers with 2017 being an increase in our sort of U-shape of fatalities.

In particular, we're rebounding from an all-time low in 2014.

And so we were predicting that our 2018, during the spring of 2018, we're predicting that that would probably be staying level.

And you can see that that was sort of an upward trend in the recent years.

Whereas when you looked at the trend going back 10 years with five-year averages, it was sort of level and increasing a little bit.

And so

We're seeing similar differences with our serious injuries and with our non-motorized severe injuries as well.

And so the Commonwealth Transportation Board agreed to hold things level for setting our 2019 targets and tasked our group with working with OIP to develop a more data-based modeling

Sorry, Steven, if I could interrupt for just a moment, if we could look at that last slide again.

I'm trying to struggle to understand this chart.

What are the blue and red dash lines?

Correct, correct.

A five year moving average.

And so you can see the five-year blue dots are sort of U-shaped, but not as extreme as what you have on an annual basis.

So the intent of the federal measure of submitting five-year averages was, well, we know things can fluctuate from year to year, and you can have a bad year and then a good year.

And so they wanted to kind of sort of normalize that or allow

That's correct.

Yes.

And for serious injuries, the annual numbers were leveling off after having a steep decline from the early 2000s down to about 2014.

And so that was also influencing the serious injury trend line on the five-year average.

And so we were seeing sort of different trajectories on the serious injuries as well.

Yeah, I think so.

So we came up with a process after considering some of the

the best practices in this area.

There was actually an NCHRP national study that looked at what was causing the reductions after the recession of 2008 and 2009.

And so we took that methodology and developed these steps.

And one was to actually look at how we can incorporate

the expected benefits that we're getting out of our projects that are prioritized through smart scale and through our highway safety improvement program.

So in both of those programs, we're actually looking at the expected benefits of those projects.

So we wanted to assess what was, where were we getting our bang for our buck in those projects.

So that's sort of step one, looking at smart scale and H-SIP.

Step two was the big,

statistical modeling exercise to look at what factors were really driving these numbers.

Why were they increasing in recent years in particular?

And so we started for our 2020 targets, looking at all those factors, and we assess some new factors here in this last spring to look for 2021.

And then we combine those two together.

So it's not really a one, two, three step.

It's kind of two parallel processes in step one and two that are combined together to give us what we'd expect from this baseline and then adding on to the model, what we'd expect for projects that are going to be completed in 2020, say into early 2021, that would give us a benefit going forward.

And so we divided projects into three categories.

Spot and corridor reductions are kind of what people think of in safety programs as hotspot reduction, which is really what smart scale is after, is looking at generally smaller corridors or intersections or curves that need to be improved.

and that was a lot of where we were spending the safety improvement program funds as well.

But we were moving towards sort of a hybrid projects which are kind of medium cost and they tend to be for corridors and it could be things like signal improvements along a corridor, improving some access management along a corridor,

or say on a rural road, you know, adding shoulders, improving the roadside, adding rumble strips, pavement markings, chevrons, et cetera, sort of middle cost type improvements that are

providing reductions and a little bit better bang for the buck, as you can see here from the actual reductions per dollar, if you will.

So the top one was mostly smart scale projects, but some safety projects through hybrid, which is mostly safety and a few smart scale projects.

And then systemic, it's pretty much all safety projects dedicated to low cost

improvements spread across the network, which are fundamentally, in most cases, traffic control devices.

So for pedestrians, it's crosswalks and countdown signals, hybrid beacons, et cetera, and such, flashing yellow arrows and back plates for signals, rumble strips,

curve signing, et cetera, for roadway departures, those kind of improvements.

And so we go through an exercise of looking at what project benefits would happen from each of those to determine what are the annual reductions going forward from those projects.

And those are added into the predictions that was the step two.

So in step two, we're looking at developing a statistical model

which we call a safety performance function.

It's actually a curve that's exponential to assess and look at those past trends of exposure.

So our vehicle miles traveled as well as other external factors.

And then because there is so much uncertainty when you're looking at

a small number of events that are happening like fatal crashes and even serious injury crashes.

We're adding sort of like a time series annual factor to calibrate the model.

And so for each of these, we're looking at factors as close as we can down to the district and month level.

So for example, VMT per month or

Snowfall per month if we have that kind of data that would look at impacts to the predictions and then those are aggregated up to the district level and then to the statewide level.

So it's essentially a 12 by 9 matrix if we can get it of factors

12 months by nine construction districts each year in developing our models.

So is that to be interpreted with those expenses, we're actually looking to have a reduction in fatalities by 3.6 people individuals.

That's right.

So then if we go back up to your other ones, so you're saying for this year, if this was this year,

We would expect the actual to be 843, 40, well actually probably 843.

Just from that project.

So we're saying 415 million, 24 million, 19 million.

I am not in any shape or form trying to evaluate this with lives, because lives have an infinite value to them.

That's all you get out of it.

Yes, sir.

So basically what we're going to say is that keeping people off of these roads, particularly, it'll be interesting to look, see what the data looks like for this period of the pandemic, because assuming that fewer people were on the roads, that number should drop significantly.

It's actually 5% higher.

Those that more of the latter.

So it's a prediction of the expected

reduction from these projects that you would get on an annual basis, sort of an annualized reduction from that point forward.

So for example, if you improved an intersection with a roundabout, which has almost an 80% reduction of serious injuries and fatalities, you would expect that intersection to have that 80% reduction annually from that point forward.

Yeah, so we annualized it.

And I mean, it seems to me that it's striking on that last slide that the bike ped systemic cost per reduction is only 1.8 million per fatality versus 415 million per spot slash corridor.

Hopefully it's driven by the improvements happening in the corridors where we're having those

I gotcha.

Does that make sense?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like the bridge tunnel, it's not going to help us with fatalities.

Thanks.

So these are all the factors, external factors that are in our models.

And you can see from the red and green, that's what we had in our models for 2020 predictions.

And we added a few of the blue ones there this past spring when we looked to update the model for our 2021

predictions.

And so there is actually elements in here that we can influence.

And so we're seeing good statistical models work when you have numbers going up and down in terms of the factors that match numbers going up and down in terms of the measure you're trying to predict.

And so you can see in the middle of the list there that there's actually spending consequences.

And what has been interesting about this is you can see that emergency and incident management spending is actually influencing our fables.

And so that golden hour that I mentioned early on is very important.

What's also interesting, and we were the first in the country to identify this at this scale, was that our behavioral programs, you know, those NHTSA grants for Click It or Ticket or Drive Sober Get Pulled Over, the Street Smarts campaigns for the non-motorized, anything that is encouraging and educating people to have better behaviors in terms of their risk taking or their

driving behaviors is actually working and in both cases for the bike pad and for the fatal and serious injuries, it's driving down the numbers.

And so that's where we get to the abilities of MPOs and localities to actually be engaged in this.

in driving the numbers down for us.

And again, we talked about resurfacing with the other measures that Andrew went over and roadway maintenance spending, which also gets into some resurfacing and other maintenance type activities like roadside and ditches and culverts, et cetera.

And so here I'm just going to show one slide on the fatalities.

The one blue dot you can see there is actually the observed numbers.

So the model is using data up through 2018, and then we are predicting 2019, 20 and 21 and using 2019 to validate the model.

So you can see those annual factors.

are putting the predicted numbers right on top of the observed numbers up to 2018.

And then you can see the difference in our prediction that we're slightly over predicting in our validation year there of 2019, but the upward trend

If you can see all the way back to that all time low in 2014 is fairly linear, sort of on the same trajectory, if you will.

And so we didn't want to get into anticipating how all of those factors, including VMT, was going to influence the model.

And so when we presented this to management and the CTB, we decided to keep all of those predicted factors on the same trajectories.

So each of the factors that was on the slide previously are predicted into the future.

And then just using simple straight line linear projection, and then that's input into the model to get these results that you see here of 912.

So we take those prediction numbers you can see here for the counts of fatalities, serious injuries, and the combined for non-motorized.

Those rounded numbers for the expected annual reductions that are coming out there.

And then this year we had legislation that gave us the ban of handheld devices while driving.

and that is not incorporated into the model in any way.

And so we have a NHTSA generated a method that gave us expected reductions for the total fatal and serious injured people, but nothing that was available to kind of break that down in terms of what it would do for the non-motorized there on the right side of the screen with the double asterisks.

And so we actually took those reductions into account as well to set our final targets, what we call the model targets for that.

And so you can see some of the changes that are happening there of sort of flattening out as we get more data into the model.

And as we refine that with more years of data, that the

predictions, the model predictions that we had for our 2020 targets were quite high in comparison.

And so those are flattening out a little bit for all, except for the non-motorized.

So now to the MPOs.

And so we have the same five safety performance measures, those same five targets.

are to be adopted, as Andrew said, to support the state target or develop their own for each or use a combination.

So you could set, for example, your own non-motorized target that is a different trajectory than the statewide targets in terms of the changes that are happening.

You are not assessed.

We are at a statewide level.

So if we don't meet our targets, we have to obligate our full allocation from Federal Highways for the Highway Safety Improvement Program.

But you are to report those and those are to be made available should Federal Highways request those each year.

So what we do for the MPOs is we look at the percent changes

And so we actually do that on the five-year average data to sort of show that normalization, if you will, over time so that we don't have these huge fluctuations in the numbers.

And we looked at the differences over the next couple of years of those five-year averages to determine the percent change at a statewide level

for you to assess at the MPO level, whether or not you're in support of that, or if you wanna be more optimistic and aggressive, that's under your purview as well, should you want to do that.

For example, we have sort of a leveling there with the Bicomped, but in particular, you're in your MPO, you may know that there's a lot going on in that space,

And so you would expect maybe a larger reduction in 2021 based on projects being completed or other outreach or things that are going on in your region.

And again, to get the rates is based on a change in the projected VMT as well, which may be changing differently at the MPO regional level.

And so we have supplied a spreadsheet that has a template to look at trend lines.

You can also, this is the five-year average charts.

You can develop charts at the annual level as well to see what's going on within your region.

And then there's a separate tab for the

the pedestrian and bike non-motorized crashes as well to look at those trend lines in order to help you look at some differences within your region versus the statewide averages.

And then every year we ask for a letter to be submitted to the state traffic engineer, to my boss,

that indicates whether or not you're going to adopt the statewide goal or not, or if you're going to look at different percent changes and thus adjust your five measures up or down from what would be the state average, if you will, in terms of those changes.

And so with that, many MPOs

submitted a board resolution and then the letter.

To date, there have been three MPOs that have set different targets, and that's not necessarily for all of them, but for at least one of the five.

And that's been the Washcock, Northern Virginia area MPO, the Richmond MPO, and Hampton Roads.

MPOs have set at least one target that's different in the last three years that we've had these submissions.

I'm just going to put up my slide for this one, too.

Well, I think it's more to be predictive and we were the first in the country to actually develop models of this level of detail to try to understand what was influencing at a large scale.

If you looked at the chart there that we had the confidence limits of the

of the model, they're quite large, right?

Because there's a lot of variability and fatalities, a lot of factors that go into those.

So it's kind of like predicting the weather in that regard.

It's very difficult.

So they're out there for us to understand that there are some macro things going on that we need to consider.

And the big ones were those spending programs.

and just how much at a project level we can do our very, very best.

We love SmartScale.

It's getting us lots of great BiCompED projects and other congestion projects, but it's very hard to hit these random crashes.

But at other levels, the maintenance money, the behavioral money through the NHTSA grants and anything that's being done at the local level for more of the encouragement, education,

enforcement side of it are showing to be really huge factors within the model.

And yeah, let me dive a little bit deeper into that last comment.

What data are you gathering that indicates that these educational programs are having this causal influence on reducing

So what we're looking at is just the federal grants, the NHTSA grants that DMV deploys to the local state, to the local police forces, sometimes to the local school divisions, you know, for the education side of it.

And through a lot of statewide programs as well, like Click It or Ticket or Drive Sober get pulled over that's implemented at the local level.

So we actually looked at local spending for each of those over those multiple years and saw that there was a downward trend.

The more money that we were spending in those jurisdictions, we're seeing a reduction.

Wow, that's honestly to me a pretty surprising result.

It is.

We were the first in the country to see this.

What level of statistical significance are you seeing there?

Well, the downward trend is quite small.

So because it's really a small program, it's only like $10 million statewide.

So you're talking about small dollars at the jurisdictional level, right?

And so it's a small downward trend and the significance is not high when you look at that downward trend, but when you look at adding it into the model, it is statistically significant at the 90% level.

Great.

Okay.

I'd like to ask what measures are being taken to measure safety by mode.

So passenger miles traveled by mode.

I think it's worth exploring whether some modes are more or less safe than others.

And if we do find that, what opportunities are there to talk about

Absolutely.

So you saw their exposure is the key driver of these statistics.

And so anything to reduce VMT is going to help.

Now, it'll be interesting when we add 2020 in there because VMT did go down, but driver behavior went a little bit

crazy.

And so we had a lot of speeding and unbelted, particularly in our rural areas that were driving the numbers back up.

So that'll be interesting to see where we go from there.

But yes, and that's how we assess smart scale projects that have anything to do with travel demand management or transit.

The benefit that we assess on a smart scale project is that reduction in VMT, which would result in a commensurate reduction in crashes.

Yeah, things have probably gotten worse during the quarantine because risk-averse people are staying home.

Right.

Any other questions?

So Lucinda has a slide up there, and I was trying to sort of coordinate her number of fatalities, and I was trying to see where she got her data from, because I see one of them off of Steven's chart, but I don't see the other ones.

I see two, so I don't see three.

I'll share the workbook with you.

Well, it's just telling me you got, I mean, I'm good.

I don't need to, I don't have my years as a, you know, as a TA, I don't need to see the work right now.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I got it from the workbook that the state will be sending us all the data for all of these measures.

Sending ours included with our local jurisdiction Yeah, I'm not sure why it's not coming up

Sounds great.

Yeah, I see where

Roughly one midterms need presentation late on time.

So if no one else has any other questions, I guess maybe we should skip ahead.

So I think we should go ahead and let Chris do his full presentation.

I did build in some time for roundtable.

It's not quite enough, but if we just drop that off the schedule, it should get us a little bit closer to ending on time.

And this is Chris on the line.

I'll definitely try to keep my presentation brief.

So I'm going to attempt to share my screen now once again here.

So thanks to the group for having me once again.

So my name is Chris Wishman, also staff to the Virginia Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment.

And I was actually with you all back in September and I went through some of the background material for the prioritization and the draft policy and the process that we're going through.

So

I was asked, I guess, coming into this call to keep the background part of the presentation brief.

So I'll even make that more brief.

My understanding is that this group's been pretty engaged in some of the workshops that we've been holding.

So I won't go into a lot of detail on the backgrounds, but I will provide these slides after the meeting for folks if they're interested.

So in terms of the overview,

V-Trans is Virginia's multimodal transportation plan.

We've got essentially four pillars of work that we're going through.

The second pillar being the identification and then the prioritization of the midterm needs.

So the midterm needs are sort of near-term issues or problems on the system statewide.

So we do this assessment, we work through it, you know,

including some contributions from you all back in 2019.

And the midterm needs were adopted by the CTB in January of this year, January 2020.

And their function, the midterm needs, one of their functions is to serve as a screening criteria for the smart scale program, as most of you all are aware.

But at the time of the adoption, the board also directed our office to go through and

develop a policy to prioritize the needs.

So essentially to hone in onto a more targeted set of needs with the intention of using the prioritization as a way to develop a project study or project development pipeline.

So this is kind of the key slide to understand why are we going through this effort

The CTB has discussed this policy on two occasions, so one at the May workshop meeting and the other at the July workshop meeting.

And again, the idea here is to use the prioritized V-Trans needs as a guide toward allocating study dollars.

So in order to sort of develop that policy, we worked through the summer

and into the fall, we've come out and spoken with MPOs and PDCs around the state sort of as we were developing the approach.

And then over the last few weeks, we've gone out with more formalized quote unquote workshops.

So the pictures on the right here are from days past where we were actually able to get together as practitioners and gather around the table with maps.

the good old days.

So unfortunately, we weren't able to do that this year with the V-Trans workshops.

But what we've tried to do is make all the materials available through web-based applications for folks to be able to provide us some feedback.

So we held two workshops that were sort of the background and overview.

So all the slides I skipped over today, if you go back and sort of watch one of these recordings, you should

get up to speed on the process.

We've also held a workshop last Friday, which was really just Q&A.

And for those interested, we have another Q&A workshop this afternoon, so 1.30 to 3 o'clock.

And there's still an opportunity to register for that workshop.

So in terms of where we are, we're under a 30-day public review and comment period.

So this is the time to provide

Comments.

And the real purpose of my being here today is to share with you all the tools available and sort of what types of comments and feedback we're looking for.

OK, great.

So our website is vtrans.org.

If you're interested in some of those previous workshop meetings, you can on the home page navigate down to events.

and you can select one of these previous events and that's where the recordings are posted for those.

As far as the prioritization and how to access those materials, if you go to Midterm Planning, Midterm Needs Prioritization, there's a webpage here that sort of captures what we've done, the backgrounds as I mentioned before and then some of the steps

The actual methodology that we follow, the four step process, which I skipped over those slides today.

But if you're looking for detail on those, you can find out more here.

But most importantly are the actual draft policy guide and then the draft technical guide.

So just to highlight those briefly, the draft policy guide is essentially the documentation of

the method for both identifying and then prioritizing midterm needs.

So this is meant to be a real sort of high level executive level document.

It's only 20 pages, but it sort of walks you through the process of establishing the needs and then gets into the prioritization.

As far as the technical guide, this is a little bit bigger document at 60 pages.

This gets into the real nitty gritty details.

You know, what are the data sources that were used?

You know, where were the what were the thresholds?

Where were the cuts made?

What systems were evaluated?

So all the various intricacies are detailed here.

So, for example, with reliability, you would know what the data sources are, year of analysis, what the calculations were.

So if you're more interested in getting into the details, the technical guide would be the place to do that.

So these documents are essentially what are out for public review now.

And they, again, document the steps that were taken in prioritization.

As far as reviewing the output of that process, we've also developed, we've

done the process and we have results that we've displayed in mappable format for your review.

So in terms of how we've done prioritization, we've done it at two levels, one at the statewide level and then also at the construction district level.

So my full slide deck, I would explain to you kind of how and why we did it this way.

But essentially, for today's presentation, I'll just introduce you to this tool and how to review the results

for both the statewide prioritization, which compares corridors of statewide significance to one another statewide.

So in this case, US 58 being compared to 64 through TJPDC to 95.

So all the corridors of statewide significance are being compared to one another statewide.

And then for construction district priority, this is where we're doing

again to what SmartScale does with the district grant program.

We're just comparing the need segment within Culpeper District to other need segments within Culpeper District.

So you're able to sort of view these results, the top line priorities one through four.

You can zoom in, you can actually select, you know, you can select a segment

and sort of use the pop out at right to understand, you know, what's going on at this particular location.

So you can look at each individual need category.

And, you know, for this example, this is US 29, and it's got a very high need for capacity preservation, a very high need for transportation demand management, a high need for transit access.

So it has a number of different things going on.

I believe safety as well.

So, you know, given our methodology, this one rose to the top as being a priority one location within Culpeper District.

So again, I didn't go into a lot of detail about what that methodology is and be happy to answer any questions.

You can also go into each category specific priority.

So within a step of the process, we establish needs within each

or establish priorities within each category.

So you can go in and turn on, for example, the transit access component by itself and sort of understand, you know, how by clicking this question mark button, sort of understand what we did with each of these, you know, what are the magnitude measures, the severity measures that were used.

And within this application, you're able to

If you click this comment box button, you're actually able to help us out and provide feedback.

If you see something in our mapping that kind of looks funny to you, based on your local knowledge, you'd be able to drop a location specific comment and help us sort of refine if something looks out of place to help us refine the method.

So you have the opportunity to click through each individual need category.

Again, drop location specific comments or review the results through this format.

One other opportunity I wanted to point out here is with our overall interactive D-TRANS application.

So this is essentially a view of interactive D-TRANS.

But with this, if you're interested in

downloading like a subset of the data.

One of our goals with this project was to make data readily available to regional bodies, local planning agencies.

So you can go through and do some querying to a MPO, a PDC, a city or county.

So I could, if I'm interested only in Albemarle County, could go in, pick Albemarle County.

And I only want to know where I have

a priority one location within the Culpeper District, just in Albemarle County.

So you can do these searches on subsets of information and then download those results if you're so inclined as a table or a shapefile.

If you're interested in all the data, you have the ability within this web page to download

and ArcGIS map package of the full set of data.

So I'm going as fast as I can here.

I do want to allow some time for questions, but just wanted to highlight a few important points or noteworthy items when you're considering this.

So one thing to keep in mind is that the needs assessment, again, is an evaluation of problems or issues with the system.

We look at a variety of

categories of needs.

But the first two points here are really important in that the needs don't necessarily dictate where a location should be located.

It could be an improvement to a parallel facility that meets the needs, and it shouldn't necessarily be sort of interpreted as a certain type of improvement that needs to be made.

A good example would be for 95 through the Fredericksburg region,

It may be some parallel improvement to US 1 or rail improvement or transportation demand management.

So that's one important thing to keep in mind with the needs assessment is it's sort of agnostic to the location or type of improvement.

Third point here is this idea of continuous improvement.

So this is our first attempt at implementing the prioritization methodology.

So

When you review the documents, I think that's maybe the critical place to provide us some feedback is if you have some different measure that you think we should be using, if you see some gap in how we've evaluated a particular category, that would be very beneficial feedback as we continually improve.

And if you see an error in the map or something that doesn't look right in the map, please do indicate that to us.

because one thing to keep in mind here is it's ultimately the policy and technical guide that sort of demonstrate the prioritization process.

The map is subject to change based on better data or fixes or things like that into the future.

And then finally, one thing to mention here is the prioritization, again, is being geared toward targeting studies and project development activities.

So in line with that, the Office of Environmental Planning and Investment is opening up a new opportunity for technical assistance.

So this is sort of similar to what folks may be familiar with the UDA grant program, but it's a little bit more all encompassing.

If you want to find out more about this program, we'll be holding two webinars and the application should be released

Applications to apply for the technical assistance should be released tomorrow as well with the first of two webinars.

I'll provide this slide deck to folks at TJPDC to share with y'all as well.

So next steps and then I can answer any questions.

So we're in a 30-day review and comment period.

We'll be sort of taking all that we hear,

and sort of bringing that all together and then reporting out to the CTB at the December workshop meeting and getting feedback from CTB members on any adjustments that may be needed to the draft policy with an eye toward requesting action at the January meeting.

So in terms of points of contact, I'm your designated point of contact for the TGA PDC area.

Feel free that if you do have questions after

today or after this call, I guess your first opportunity would be to jump on the 130 Q&A session.

But if you have anything after that, feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email.

I'd be happy to answer those.

And please do if you see something worthy of providing comment, please do provide those to us by November 30th.

So that was my expedited presentation.

I have two questions.

Yeah, there is one area where we used origin destination.

So within one of the categories, and you can, again, use this tool to investigate the data sources.

So one place we did use origin destination data, we actually relied on some streetlight data for this is we have a factor, a severity factor for the quarters of statewide significance transportation demand management category, where we're accounting for the number of interregional network weekday trips.

So these are essentially, you know,

flows between the TJPVC or I guess it would be the Charlottesville Albemarle regional network to say Richmond's regional network and those were loaded to 64 as an example or the primary COSS facility and then used as the severity measure for this particular category.

But if my memory serves me correct that may be the only

The idea behind streetlight is good, and there is a real need for that kind of data, but I have very serious doubts about the accuracy of that data, so I'd be interested in anybody who's going to verify that.

But my second question is, will funding requests for a transit service, which has annual operating costs, is that going to be treated the same as an infrastructure project that would have a large

upfront costs that would then be amortized over the life of that project?

Yeah, so I would say, I guess, for a point of clarification, with the priority, this prioritization exercise for V-trans is really being geared toward, you know, where should we study?

Or where should we develop potentially a solution?

and then with the funding programs themselves, they may evaluate the sort of the efficacy of the improvement itself.

So like SmartScale is an example of that and making decisions on how to apply funding.

So I would sort of leave, I wouldn't feel as comfortable answering on behalf of those who work on those programs.

But for what we're doing, we're essentially trying to hone in on what corridor within

Great.

Well, we'd love to be a part of those initiatives.

For the feedback that you, if you solicited, or you suggested if we wanted it,

using the GIS, using this software here.

I'll talk.

This is swimming way above my daily package of information, although living here I know a bunch, but I'll talk to my trustee traffic while interesting.

Yeah, and I think that what we try to do with this is You know make it accessible to all all types of users.

So as you can see, you know, we have multiple Methods of kind of understanding what's being done here.

So Julian if you're more inclined to

toward the executive summary type review, definitely maybe geared towards taking a look at the draft policy guide and what we're doing there.

Yeah, to Julian's point, this is Bill Palmer.

I guess I was wondering maybe,

Yeah, this is Kevin.

I'm actually talking with Dan who's also on this call right now.

to make sure that the county's needs are addressed and that we agree with the methodology and everything.

And I see Jeanette is on the line now.

Good to hear.

Any other questions from the crew?

Great.

Yeah, I will say that one thing, you know, this is a lot of these the data that's back into this is, you know, observed and

You know, for example, for safety, we've used the last five years of crash data.

So, you know, improvements that sort of are under construction or have recently been constructed, you know, may not be accounted for here.

And that that'll be a consideration when it does come down to, you know, actually deciding how this process will be used to guide decision making around studies is there'll have to be some check against, you know, we already invested

millions of dollars along this corridor.

Have we seen the benefit of that?

And that's where some of the ideas that Andrew was getting to with the monitoring of the system.

Sounds good.

He also pointed out the, uh, he went in on the, uh, segment of 29 there, just north of Polo grounds.

And I was same thing as Rory pointed out.

I was like, we just widened that to four lanes two years ago.

And it says we need more capacity now.

But my experience meets my expectation up there.

And every time I drive 29 through there, it's wide open and easy to move through.

All right.

Thanks, Chris.

All right.

So last up on our agenda.

Well, separate matters from the public.

It's going to be smart scale process changes.

I'm not sure that I can get you quite caught up on the agenda schedule, but I can try.

And this will be very short.

also because I too have a meeting in about five minutes, another one.

This is just, we have already briefed you previously at least once and maybe twice on a recommended policy change we're making to the MPO Policy Board.

It's also going to the Citizens Advisory Committee.

There are very few changes in this policy that we presented prior.

And what we're trying to do is just get started earlier in selecting the projects that the MPO will be submitting for SmartScale funding.

Following the previous rounds, we expect to be able to submit four projects for SmartScale funding in the 2022 round.

What we're trying to do is to have an early identification

from both the local governments as well as, you know, if CTAC or if the technical committee has recommendations, if Jaunt or CAT has recommendations, as well as any citizen groups may have recommendations of potential projects.

The biggest change with this policy, in addition to trying to identify those early,

is to have the policy board to identify up to two of those projects that would have extensive planning and community engagement way beyond what VDOT and SmartScale requires to go about 12 months prior to when the actual applications are due.

You've heard a lot of stuff today from OIP and from VDOT.

This extra time would give us a chance, that will give us a chance to use some of these data metrics in determining the prioritization for the projects that

that the MPO will be recommending.

Again, the biggest change that we included in this revision to the policy is to make sure that the MPO Policy Board doesn't have to follow this policy after it's implemented.

If we're in the planning process and something were to come up that, you know, perhaps I'll even use the current work that the city's doing on Fifth Street.

If recent events have caused a certain project to have a higher priority, the MPO Policy Board could always say, okay, we appreciate the work that's gone into this, but

This particular project we want to move above.

So, you know, and it's very similar to what the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

They received the recommendations to smart scale, but they can always pick a project that was submitted no matter where it ranked and move it up in the smart scale process.

They just have to be able to justify why they do that.

the MPO Policy Board would have that same ability here with our policy.

So one question I've got is, in composing these advisory panels,

Where is the MPO policy board going to draw from?

And how does that end up playing out in a way that isn't, I guess, biased towards professional

organizations who try to influence these things.

I'm thinking about Route 20.

One environmentalist organization notably opposed it.

I can see how they would get on that advisory board pretty easily.

I'm also thinking about 10th and Grady and how members of the community had concerns about that project.

It seems a little bit more difficult to me to see how in this timeline they hear about the project,

Well I would say it'll end up being both you know.

The model that we're using that I believe should be used is the model we use for hydraulic in 29

on two separate types of these committees where they had a membership of 12 people.

It included technical as well as community members.

And also when comprising the committee, we tried to get people who were both for the project who had been identified as for the project and that people who identified as opposed to project and have them sit on the committee itself.

Now,

The second part, I think, of your question is also by having those set representatives, other community members and other organizations could lobby those people sitting on the committee.

And that's why we wanted to make sure that the committee would be selected by the MPO Policy Board.

With it having representatives

Hi Chip, this is Julian.

Are there opportunities for like, I guess,

Okay.

So, for instance, if a road project on North 29

were a priority, unless it was the research part, probably wouldn't have a direct interest.

But if it were on Fontaine, they would probably have a very direct interest and would need to be on the committee.

Anything else?

And they will be strictly advisory.

They could make a recommendation to the NPO Policy Board to say this project shouldn't move forward.

We've looked at VTRANS.

We've looked at the performance measures.

There's either not a need for it or there are perhaps land use consequences that would be negative.

And so they could make a recommendation for or against to the MPO policy board.

Again, the policy board is where the buck stops.

Well, hopefully by making, hopefully in this case, both committees, they would be, there would be a good indication before the last day that, hey, we've got a problem, which is another reason I think for starting early.

Thanks.

Any other questions?

Just one comment that I put out there.

The one thing I really like about this plan is the idea of having a brief website description on the web of each of these potential projects, which I think there was a great one of those during those webinars last spring or whatever.

And I'd love to see that happen.

I'd love to see it happen earlier and be pushed out a little more.

I'm skeptical of the idea of just bringing in a bunch of random people to offer critiques.

But I know you guys want us to give a recommendation or lack of a recommendation.

So I'd be interested in hearing everyone else's comments or a motion.

So I can say I had the privilege to sit on the hydraulic 29.

as an observer, not as a participant, but as an observer.

And I can suggest to you that it was an eclectic group, property owners to professionals, the whole package and varied group of people.

And even though many of them had came from different aspects of their business lives,

It was really, I felt, I remember saying to Diane McKeel, who invited me to sort of sit in and look to observe, I felt really good about the whole idea of what citizen involvement, even though, you know, each citizen has their own expertise hat on.

And so let's give that over.

But each of them came to that discussion and brought what I thought were

There were some parochial questions and there were some things that were all about me, not me, Julia, all about them.

But not me, it wasn't me, but about them.

But yet the people worked through that and hopefully the people in Richmond, if any of the people in Richmond are still on right now,

will understand that that smart scale project should in fact be funded.

So it was a whole, and I think you may have come with also, they set up a whole series more than I thought was actually humanly possible to go and talk to all of the various communities that this project touched, who would be touched by it.

And that was actually quite interesting to see.

To see a whole different set of people who don't typically come to public hearings come out and sort of say yes, no, maybe, or I don't understand

So it can work, and I think you've got to, I think Chip's put together a team that is committed to making that work and can continue to refine it.

And Julia, thank you for that.

And it's exactly kind of the model, but I want to be upfront also.

We will not have near the money to spend that the hydraulic had.

Yeah, and I will say last round I raised some concerns about a nearby affected business and one of those hydraulic projects potentially not, you know, being informed and I was wrong.

I was talking to their kids and they were very informed.

So that was good.

But I also feel like the Rio 29 committee, you know, we see some bloat where they start to, you know,

go kind of out of the purview of that SmartScale project and start talking about recommending, you know, for or against various land use projects in the somewhat near vicinity.

But again, there's other comments like hear them.

Otherwise I would entertain a motion.

Is there a second?

We lost our quorum.

Second.

All right.

We have a motion and a second.

We want to call roll on this one or the voice vote work.

All right.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Got five.

And all opposed, say no.

No.

And sounds like that's it.

Thank you.

And with that, I guess we still have our last matters by the public.

We do have one member of the public, as far as I can tell, still here.

So Mr. Orban, if you would like to say anything, speak now or hold your peace.

I'll take that as a no.

So meeting is adjourned.