MPO Technical Committee Meeting   1/19/2021

And I'm going to get us started by reading the statement that we have to read at the beginning of every meeting so

The governor has declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the nature of this declared emergency makes it impracticable or unsafe for the Charlottesville, Albemarle MPO technical committee to assemble in a single location.

This meeting and the required public hearings will be held utilizing electronic virtual communication with the Zoom software application.

In accordance with virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01 of the Virginia state budget,

HB 29 as effective April 24, 2020.

The meeting will be recorded and made available to the public at our website.

All right.

The next thing we usually do is take attendance.

I have the list of participants.

I think we're going to skip the taking attendance part.

Sandy, is that all right?

Is there any reason we have to legally do attendance?

No?

Okay.

We have the list.

We have the list.

That's what I thought.

Okay, so I will hand it over to Rory.

Rory, we do have like some big news about Chip leaving, but we can discuss that in the staff updates or we can just kind of add it in after our meeting minutes are approved or not approved.

Yeah, let's go ahead and do matters for the public and the meeting minutes first and then get to that.

Okay, so matters from the public.

Do we have any members of the public here?

I don't think so.

So let's go ahead to approval of the draft meeting minutes.

I do have one tweak.

My name is spelled Stolzenberg once, but it's the only change I got.

Anyone else has any amendments?

I would entertain a motion to approve.

All right, motion and second.

He was opposed.

I'm not opposed.

He is not voting.

He's abstain.

Actually, there's a difference between abstain and no vote.

Oh, interesting.

Good to know.

We heard a no vote.

Just to clarify, there's been a change on the committee membership.

So Mr. Keller, is that correct?

Spot.

And Daniel Bailey is taking my spot on CTAC.

Well, welcome, Tim, our new member.

Thank you.

Happy to have you here.

Yeah, so as you all know, I'm assuming Chip Boyles has taken a position as the interim city manager for City of Charlottesville.

So yay for Chip.

We're very excited for him, although we're sad to lose him here.

In the meantime, Christine Jacobs is going to step in as our interim director.

That's as much as I know, Sandy.

Did you want to say anything, Christine?

I know you're on the call, but you asked to just listen and learn.

I don't know if you want to unmute yourself and say anything.

Yeah, no, the only thing I'm going to say is obviously, you know, there are a lot of initiatives that really CHIP has sort of had a really clear vision for.

We're going to keep moving forward.

We're going to keep doing what the MPA does.

Obviously, we don't know exactly how our workload is going to change.

Well, we're going to figure it out.

We just ask for you guys to be patient with us.

We'll do the best we can.

There are a lot of things that a lot of us are going to

be learning very quickly about things that we haven't been involved with yet.

So yeah, we'll keep things moving forward.

Hopefully you won't notice much of a difference at least in, you know, operations and practices and things like that.

But some of the projects may take a little bit longer to get moving as we sort of, you know, deal with any number of other things that might have to come up first.

But we just want to mention it too.

You know, you're welcome to ask questions.

Well, you know,

be figuring things out as we go.

So we're happy to hear suggestions, feedback.

Again, just be patient with us in the short term.

I'll just add that I'm here to listen and learn and do whatever I can to support all the initiatives that we've got going on.

Obviously, as Jessica said, I'm here in an interim role and we'll do anything and everything I can to make sure that we have continuity of service and that we maintain

Great.

Well, thanks to staff and thanks for handing over Chip.

Your loss is our game.

So we're excited to have him here and hopefully we make some good progress.

Also, I believe he is the full city manager.

just with a possible end date for maybe hiring anyone.

But hopefully he sticks around too.

So yeah, again, good to have him.

So next up in our agenda is going to be membership and bylaws.

So you all reviewed the membership roster, which seems may have to change, and have any changes to the bylaws.

Yeah, so I'll just pop in here, Rory, if that's all right.

So I asked you guys to take a look.

Membership is kind of a weird thing with MPO Tech.

So what I want you to do is just take a look at this page.

And like Rory said, with the exception of Julian, switching over to Tim Keller, make sure that your name is on here if you believe you are a voting member.

And make sure that your name is spelled correctly.

We want to make sure that this page is as up to date as possible.

Let's see.

The reason membership is such a confusing thing for MPO Tech is because the bylaws are quite old.

I'm going to move over to the bylaws page.

So if you've read our bylaws recently, Sandy and I were poring over this membership section.

I'm just going to read it to you guys.

The voting membership of the technical committee shall be composed of three members each, designated by and representing the city and the county, which I think we have.

one designated by and representing the department, which I believe is the Department of Transportation, so VDOT, and we have Chuck, and one designated by and representing the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, and there we have Wood.

That's us.

Charlesville Transit Service, which we have, and any appropriate agency as determined by the NPO.

We don't have to make any major decisions today, but if people feel

Yeah, I mean, two comments I'd make.

Well, one, since 2001, the Charlottesville Transit Service is now Charlottesville Area Transit.

Not the most important change, but certainly has changed.

Second, in the non-voting members, there's something called a representative of the Long-Range Plan Citizen Advisory Committee, which I couldn't find anything about on the internet.

That makes sense.

OK. Great.

Yeah.

That's a good question.

I mean, I think, so thinking about the long range plan citizen advisory committee, which is now CTAC, we do have a member who is our vice or our chair of that committee is appointed to come and attend this meeting.

But those are citizens who are usually at work at this time.

So they often don't come.

So yeah, we can have those people appointed.

So, yeah, I mean, it seems like certainly the FAA and FTA and even the airport authority, we haven't had a member from them in a long time, right?

Yeah, that's a good point.

Hey Jessica, Lucinda can verify this for me, but I believe several of those are also nonvoting members of the policy board as well.

So it's also possible that that's where they're plugging in.

We have a member from the FTA.

I don't know if they've ever been to a meeting that I've been at.

FTA generally does not attend.

Speaking as a joint representative, you know, we'd definitely be interested in having the airport more involved

Since our service goes closest to the airport right now, and last year we started working with Greene County, so it's possible that our service in that area will grow further.

So that sounds like some work for us to do on our end.

Rory, I think the question for the rest of the group is, do you guys want to do more of a deep dive into these bylaws?

Yeah, I didn't see anything objectionable in there, except for some stale names.

But does anyone in the group have any corrections they'd like to make?

I'd like to get some clarity on part of Article Two.

So in the list there, you've got the committee will and then number two is cooperate in the development of the procedures for the collection of traffic data and reassignment of traffic.

So I have two responses to that.

The first is traffic data is one kind of data and an important kind of data, but I don't think it's the only kind of data.

And I was wondering, is this too specific?

Is this going to limit us in any way to working with other kinds of data?

Sandy, can I hand that off to you at all?

My first comment is that I feel like a lot of other parts of this plan, this is a relic that probably we need to really think about.

I do think this was kind of specific because the MPO hasn't traditionally really been involved with the developments or collection of traffic data.

I think we can certainly, I think that's a role that we could

you know, participate in.

I don't know that we want to call it out as a specific role since it seems like that is not maybe the most effective use of what we can be doing as a regional body in terms of the, you know, role that we've traditionally played and what other departments are doing.

I would suggest we either think about how we could generalize that a little bit more.

I mean, we're already talking about the transportation plan.

I think maybe what might be more appropriate would be to, instead of talking about data, to talk about resources and access to resources and information more generally, maybe something like that, or else

Sandy, if you don't mind, I'll make a quick comment on that.

I think I would appreciate, I don't think it's something major

a little bit.

I don't know why you need to be so specific about it.

It's obviously referencing the modeling work as part of the long range transportation plan.

And the reassignment of traffic is really just determining which roads we're saying are going to get that traffic, but that's really done through the modeling process.

Okay, I'm reminded a little bit of streetlight data.

I know that that was a data source that the PDC got access to.

My recommendation is keep your bylaws as simple as possible and really think about what the core function of the technical committee is.

And that's really to do these meetings, to do the collaboration, kind of intergovernmental communication and define

the do's and don'ts of the MPO through the other documents related to the long range transportation plan, the unified work program and things like that.

I don't think you guys really need to get into all sorts of details about data and stuff and bylaws because that doesn't really fit in this location per se.

I just put a link up to Roanoke's TPO

their tech committee's bylaws, and they're like three pages, you know, really just focused on who the membership is, how the meetings are run, and what the core functionality of the committee is.

Thanks for that advice.

How does the committee feel generally about scaling back the bylaws to make them more general?

Tim?

I think it's a good idea.

I agree.

I was going to suggest the same thing, that you could cut about half, the second half of that out, I think, that whole purpose.

because that last sentence when it says the committee shall integrate land use and environmental considerations.

Great.

My one last comment is that, you know, because you guys are the 895 Intergovernmental Review Agency, you guys should have a voting member, which I don't think we have for you.

Yeah, I think we, Sandy, it sounds like you were assuming that Chip was our voting member, but we didn't have him listed.

So yeah, we will come up with a voting member.

I think additionally, hearing no other comments, I'll take what you guys have said.

I will make some revisions to the bylaws and have it for you guys in your next meeting packet.

So you guys can take a look at those recommended revisions.

Otherwise, that's all we really needed to cover for this section.

Yep, that sounds great.

Yeah, this is a big update, guys.

The next one, I guess, won't be till 2040.

So, see your turnaround on it.

All right, so next up will be the tip amendment for the Belmont Bridge.

Lucinda?

Hi, I'm going to share my screen.

So this memo was in your packet too.

Can everybody, can you see it?

Okay.

And we're going to make an amendment to the transportation improvement program, the TIP.

The Belmont Bridge project, the Route 20 bridge replacement, the cost of construction is increasing.

So we're adding about $6 million to that amount.

So in the memo, there's the new block and then the old block.

And it just shows the amount, the total cost has gone up.

It's a pretty standard amendment.

It's in alignment with the state transportation improvement program, and we need to have the policy board vote on it.

So I'm hoping that this committee will make a recommendation to the policy board.

on approving or not approving it.

And the staff recommends that you approve the amendment.

It's a combination.

It's federal dollars.

There's a match to the federal dollars, but I don't think it's local.

It'll be funded through state funds.

But like I said, there's a state match to the federal dollars.

So basically, this is all federal dollars.

and then whatever matches to those federal dollars.

But we need to actually get this approved.

The project's supposed to go to advertisement and this will hold up advertisement of the project for construction if it's not approved.

Hey, Chuck.

This is actually a change in local funding.

It doesn't change our state or federal

dollars is just increasing the estimate.

And Belmont was advertised yesterday.

What this will do is hold up award of the contract.

Yeah, that was a we went through the process condition got conditional approval to advertise it.

Yes, but we do need to approve this as soon as possible.

Do we have a second?

I second that.

All right, staff, can we call the roll?

Great.

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

Any abstentions or no votes?

All right.

The motion carries.

And can I ask staff, or Jeanette and Chuck maybe, what's driving the cost increase?

It's just a conglomeration of things.

It had to do with the increase in construction estimate pricing that we've seen over the last few years.

That's dipped down.

Great.

Well, thanks so much for all your hard work.

It's great to see the Belmont Bridge finally going to happen.

Thanks.

So that's me too.

And I think you probably remember the last meeting we had a discussion about the safety targets and some presentations from OP.

And so with some more thought and consideration,

The staff is going to recommend that we adopt state targets for all of our performance measures.

I think at this point, we're not in a position to recommend alternative targets and also the MPO is not in a position to make any significant changes to the performance of those assets being measured.

So there's not really

any reason for us to adjust the targets.

So I'm recommending that we just adopt the state targets and continue with the state program.

There's a paper along with this that the performance targets overview that explains it more in depth and I'm happy to answer questions and discuss it further if you guys have questions.

Tim.

Just as the rollover from CTAC, I think that more of the questions, and we have a new member who just joined who has retired

transportation engineer from UVA.

The questions were not so much in challenging the standards as that difference that there was between what the standards were and what was being met in that report.

Lucinda, could you maybe

refer back to that.

That was really the question and issue there.

And I'm just bringing that forward because it's a related group and you all might want to think about it.

So I think, Tim Keller, what you're talking about is the safety performance targets.

And there is a large difference in some of the projected trends for the MPO area versus the state target area.

or the overall state.

And you can see in this chart here, like the fatalities for the state is increasing and the fatalities for the MPO is projected to decrease.

But I've been told by the engineers that most likely it will also increase, like go along more with the state targets.

So that is a consideration that the committee can think about.

We can make adjustments.

If you want to make a recommendation to staff, we can make that recommendation to the policy board.

It just seemed like the MPO is not in any position to make any significant changes that would affect this performance.

So we didn't think that we should be

kind of stepping outside and making our own targets if we weren't going to make any effective changes to them.

But it is, I guess, the last time we set these targets, there was a discussion among committee members that why would we make our goal to increase fatalities?

You should have like a zero tolerance policy for that.

and that's kind of a choice of the committee if you want to do that or not.

And can you remind us like what are the consequences of not meeting the targets?

So there's no financial consequences for the MPO and the state

makes their targets and gives their targets to the FTA and the FTA measures the state on the state targets.

So there's also no consequences.

If we set our own targets and those targets are not met, the state and the FTA are not looking at those targets.

However, the MPO will have to write a reason why we didn't meet the targets and what we're going to do to meet the targets in the future.

and that's kind of where I got caught up because we, you know, we don't really have a budget.

We're not going to be making transportation projects.

You know, there's not a lot of decisions or financing that the MPO has control over.

So there's nothing that I could say that we would do to effect a change to meet our targets.

If we say we were going to meet the state targets, then we can say, you know, the state is doing X, Y and Z to meet.

their targets.

I don't believe they do currently.

However, the state will be choosing projects based on some of these targets.

So we probably will want to align the long-range transportation plan with the targets more than it currently is.

They're still relatively new.

So I think that when the original long-range transportation plan that we have now, the current one, was kind of around the same time that the targets and performance measures were being established.

So I think this round, the LRTP will

be more aligned with them.

That is the one place that we could kind of have an influence or a participation in these targets is in our LRTP.

We could prioritize our projects aligned with these targets.

So that is something that we could say that we're doing.

And it's not, there wouldn't be any consequences if we decided to go with our own targets and not meet them.

We just have to say, you know, why we did it and how we're going to try to meet them.

Yeah, I mean, certainly my implication and kind of my view of how regional transportation policy should be run is that we should be prioritizing reductions in fatalities and serious injuries over, you know, bridge that condition and ride quality.

And it's a little bit disturbing to me to see the state targets having two extra fatalities and 53 extra serious injuries, more than double the serious injuries.

We do focus most of our efforts on safety over congestion.

If you look where most of our projects are, they're addressing high crash locations.

So we are focused

on that.

We look at those crash data on a regular basis to determine where those locations are.

And we try to focus most of our even our smart scale applications and all of our project efforts are towards those efforts.

It all plays into it.

The bridges, they're separate pots of money and on a statewide level,

If we don't meet targets or we don't have a reasonable plan for trying to achieve those targets, then we could get forced in on a statewide level by the federal government to focus all of our resources more on those activities, which we're already doing.

So I don't know if it's really going to be

that much of a change over what we're currently doing.

But I definitely agree that with the update to the long range plan, we can have this discussion and focus that on those areas.

I know Wood's on the call and he was part of the group that put together the last long range plan.

And we looked at both safety and

as well as congestion.

And those were the highest priorities for the development of the long range plan.

We looked at a bunch of different factors to identify those projects.

And then we worked through the process and the committees to identify what those projects are.

I think we can have that discussion as part of the next round and moving forward to develop what our goals are for the long range plan.

I would like to ask about the data that feeds these safety recommendations.

I see that we've got tables about the condition of pavement, but I'm curious if other kinds of data can contribute to safety like mode shift.

So if we know that transit is safer or

Pedestrian travel is safer than driving.

Based on the state program, absolutely.

They basically look at the transportation as a system.

They look for the deficiencies, but they wouldn't necessarily, you know, when they're evaluating their programs, they wouldn't necessarily prescribe a solution.

So any intervention or

improvement that you make would be on the table.

I don't know though, based on for this document, I think the place to do that would still be in the long range transportation plan.

And just to answer your question, Rory, by adopting these targets, we are not committing ourselves to using these for any specific purpose in the long range transportation plan.

The long range transportation plan will still develop

It's specific methodology for how projects are prioritized and then and that's the place where we're going to have a lot more access to the transportation modeling to know what kinds of system interventions might go into effect.

Any alternative, Lucinda can speak to this better, but any alternative target that we're presenting right now is not based on projections based on interventions.

It's really based on current trends.

So it's not setting necessarily an aspirational goal that we're going to work to achieve by putting in place all these interventions.

It's basically just looking at what's already happening and assuming that that's going to keep happening.

So that would be the difference between adopting the state targets

versus adopting a local target is where it's not actually leading to any sort of change and how we're doing transportation planning at this point.

I'd like to make a couple comments if you don't mind.

For one, I think that

Generally, at least in the county, I can't really speak for the city, but all of our projects are focused on safety.

We really don't target a project unless there's an identified safety need, whether that's for pedestrian and bicycle safety or for vehicular safety.

of those targets.

Like if there's a safety issue that's also a congestion issue, which we tend to see pretty often.

particular crashes, especially.

So I think that we are already moving towards that.

And I also wonder if the state was considering what I think is going to be maybe not an immediate effect, but over the long term, an effect on safety is the new law about

Not using phones when you're driving that I can't remember what they how they refer to it but that you're not allowed to have a phone in your hand when you're driving anymore and it seems like that's one of the major contributing factors that most of our

and of course, lack of seatbelts.

It's surprising how many of our fatalities had a lack of seatbelt wearing, which I think is changing over time.

So it seems like we should be moving at least locally towards a greater decrease in fatalities than maybe what the state is.

I guess one point about the, especially on the fatality side of these targets, is that data can be very lumpy because a fatality event is, in terms of the data, an anomaly, because you have hundreds of millions of successful trips, and then you have a fatality in a place like Charlottesville that is relatively small in comparison to somewhere like Northern Virginia.

If you could have one accident,

that could double your fatality, your rolling fatality rate because it could involve three or four people.

So those are kind of things to watch out for when looking at that, this data and trying to interpret and understand it is that geographically and population wise, you're dealing with kind of a smaller area.

So it can be really hard to set a reasonable target.

You know, there's a difference, I think, between a target and an aspirational goal.

I mean, these targets end up just kind of being these numbers.

There are places that have said, you know, our goal is vision zero, but we understand that we have to set a reasonable target and our reasonable target is X, Y, and Z. I think

Trent TPB up in the DC area essentially did that with their targets.

And I think the word projection makes the most sense.

Yeah, and on that note, you know, the middle column is the projected actuals based on current trends, right?

which matches the alternative targets.

Yeah.

So I have two tables.

Actually, yeah.

So yeah, I'm recommending we stick with the state targets.

You can't see me pointing at the screen.

Wait, you can see my mouse, which is here.

These are the state targets.

And then this is the trend that is projected.

for our area, for only the MPO area.

And then this would be if we decided to adopt our own targets, then we would need to come up with these numbers in this last column here.

So these are the same chart.

This is what we're recommending the policy board adopt, which is the state targets.

So again, the first two columns are the same as that last table.

It's better to see if you look at the graphs.

I mean, I don't know if you have the graphs available, but toward the latter years, it's starting to trend upwards.

So this is looking at a five-year average.

And it's just, I think we haven't seen that

Yeah.

I mean, if you look at these, see how the trends are going or dipping down on the lower two graphs, see how they're dipping down, they're going back up, they're dipping down, they're going back up.

We haven't seen this caught back up.

And this is across the state.

So we're going to start to see that.

If anything, it's flattening out.

I also imagine that during the 2008 recession, that was when we saw a significant decrease in fatal and serious injury accidents.

Is it likely that we're gonna see that decrease happen as the result of the COVID shutdown and what is likely to be a change in travel patterns over the next

What we're seeing is, contrary to that, we're seeing an increase by about 5% in the number of crashes.

Which is, we would expect it to drop off, but no, it's not.

It's increasing.

And it's not that the VMT's gone down, it's just that people are

Yeah.

So but like I'm saying, I think we're going to see the trends start to go up

as opposed to negative.

And that's why I would recommend to go with the state trends.

And we get to review this.

It's nothing that's fixed in stone.

It really doesn't affect anything we do from an MPO standpoint.

And we get to look at this data every year.

So next year, we can look at it again.

I think the biggest thing is how we're going to

show how this address or affect what we program or what we put in the long range plan.

So if the long range transportation plan is the place we should be going to to set aspirational targets and this document is just identifying the projection of what we think is likely to happen.

I mean, shouldn't that projection be whatever our best guess is, irregardless of our opinions?

Well, hopefully we can see those trends, no negative, as a result of what we program out of the long range plan.

Chuck, I have a question for you.

So it sounds like you're saying that the local projections are based on five-year averages.

So you're saying that the state stuff would just be more accurate because it has more data versus our local projections?

Because it sounds like you're saying we should trust the state data more than our local data.

All I'm saying is that it's representative of the area that you're in, not necessarily the amount of data.

I mean, the state data, there's more crashes across the state versus the miles that are traveled because you have a lot that occur in the urbanized areas, the highly dense urbanized areas across the state.

We have, in this area, we have crashes and we're seeing the trends start to, I mean, they're following the same track.

It's just not as significant of a upturn as what we're seeing across the rest of the state, but we're still seeing an upturn.

and that's, we're sort of lagging behind, I guess is what I'm saying.

But we will see it and Steve and Reed, when he did his presentation, he was showing how the data is trending.

I mean, and this is showing what it's doing.

So I mean, we're gonna continue to follow this track.

And it's not necessarily like Wood pointed out, it's not necessarily the fatalities,

but it's these severe injuries that you need to focus on because those are the ones, fatalities are more of a fluke or we can't predict where the severe injuries are gonna be.

We have a better accuracy on predicting where the serious injuries are gonna be and that's why you look at the serious injuries, we're seeing it start to uptick on both these graphs and in the future, it's gonna continue to uptick

We're just still have a lot in that lower on the backside of it that's still pulling the averages down.

But once we get the next two years of data, it's going to trend upwards.

And that's what this data is showing.

If you look at the blue columns, the trends are upwards for the severe injuries.

And that's what I'm saying is in two years, we'll be positive.

or next year we could we could be positive instead of negative.

And that's what I all I was saying.

Having to go with those positive numbers as opposed to the negative numbers.

So I don't what do you state with the state or what do you adopt the local trends?

So while the local trends might be more specific to us, it's a smaller data set.

So like Wood pointed out, there's going to be more volatility in it.

So if we go with the state's numbers, it might be less specific to us, but it's also a larger data set.

Has this been like way more

It's okay.

I anticipated you guys would want to talk about this.

So don't worry about that.

As an aside, can I express an interest that we have somebody come talk to us in the future about like Vision Zero and what that means for locality and how that might affect the long range transportation plan because

That's probably Steven Johnson.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, we had this discussion when they first came out with the targets for the same reasons.

We went around and it was basically closely involved in that about the Vision Zero.

Why don't we set zero targets?

I think our initial trends were showing that by 2021, we'd be at negative.

Below have negative numbers on these.

If you look at the trends in the early parts of these graphs.

So.

If you guys want to do vision zero or, you know, adjust the targets based more on our local data, that's fine with me.

I started off on that opinion and kind of got worn down through all of the discussion.

I'll just say that I'm not really going to advocate for either the recommended or alternative scenarios.

affect what the decisions that we're making.

I think we're already working.

I mean, as you mentioned, we can have Vision Zero as a goal.

And essentially, that is our goal.

I mean, I'm always working to try and find ways to prevent serious or fatal injuries in all the work that we do.

So that's not going to change whether we say we think next year we're going to have nine or seven

So I'm saying it doesn't really matter to me.

Yes, I just, I just, I agree with, with Kevin.

I just brought this up because we'd had a really,

Thoughtful discussion at SeaTac like we've just had here and I just wanted everyone to be aware of it.

Great.

Okay, I'll make the motion.

I motion that we adopt or we recommend the policy board adopt the state performance targets as recommended by the staff.

All right, we have a motion and a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right, motion carries with one abstention.

Thanks, you guys.

Okay, so we've started putting together a draft for the 2022 fiscal year UPWP, just looking at what is going to be required for that, what our workload looks like.

So you'll see on the spreadsheet, I started a budget that just looks at what work we anticipate that we're going to be taking on.

and thinking through what kind of staff resources and other types of resources are going to be required to do that.

One of the things we're really trying to do in light of just learning from this past year, thinking through me as being new to developing the work program, looking at the new VDOT invoicing, that kind of thing, is we're going to try to simplify the work program so that we can focus on a fewer number of things, but more meaningfully and more intentionally.

So we are trying to reduce the overall total number of projects that we're going to be working on and we think that that will help us both administratively and also just to make sure that we're producing better products.

So this is based on assuming we get the same budget that we had last year, which of course we don't know just yet.

The work that we're anticipating is a lot of it is the same work that we have to do every year.

The things that we're adding in

We're going to continue the north 29 corridor study which also has a rural component so we're going to be putting a lot of our resources into that.

We're going to be ramping up for the next long range transportation plan update.

So we have a small amount basically just to prepare a scope and to determine if we're going to need to retain some technical consultants

services to help with that.

And then, you know, this is actually very timely based on the conversation you all just had about the bylaws.

We're also going to recommend at this point that we undertake a process of doing an MPO strategic plan, also with a consultant agency.

And this would really be to help guide

sort of establish a better sense of what we want the MPOs work to really, I don't want to say accomplish.

I think we generally know that.

But who is our clientele?

Whose preferences do we prioritize?

Also, as we get the census information back, we're probably going to be looking at a redistricting.

So we need to be thinking through how do we incorporate, you know, Green County, Fluvanna, Louisa, potentially,

into our MPO and define some of that as well as looking at our committee structure and looking at what makes sense as far as how we're using our committees, what their purposes are, what kind of work do we need to go through.

So we think that that's really important.

We think that this is a really good time to be undertaking that.

While the other localities that aren't currently part of the MPO may be impacted by it, we might be looking at some way for them to at least be involved in that process once they have a better sense of what that's going to look like for redistricting.

But I think that that's probably an important conversation to have every now and then.

And so we're going to go ahead and recommend that we do that now.

So this is the total budget.

We get resources from both the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration.

This budget is based on, there's a column, the PL is the Highway Administration funding, and then the FT is the Transit Administration fund.

So we get a budget for each of those, and this number right here is the total.

So based on, and a lot of these are estimates, you know, based on what we think we're going to spend,

So based on that number right there, that 298, that's what I think my best guess is that we are going to be spending on the other activities that we've already listed.

And then we're going to compare that to this 322,500.

That's what the total budget is for the MPO based on last year's number.

So assuming it's similar to that, we would have about

24, $25,000 that we could do probably one additional type of

study work project kind of thing.

And so, first of all, I wanted to give you all an initial glance just to see, you know, what we're already planning, give you an opportunity to talk about that.

But then we also wanted to talk about with that remaining budget that we might have, what would be the most important to you all so that we can we can develop the rest of the UPWP based on y'all's input.

Right now, this is just a discussion.

We're not asking for you all to vote on anything.

Our hope is that we can take your feedback, CTAC's feedback, the MPA policy board's feedback, develop this into a work plan that you can look at at your next meeting in March, and then we'll have a public hearing in May.

So this is a goal to get you all sort of thinking about this earlier in the process.

Lucinda and Jessica and I brainstormed a little bit.

We had a couple of, we tried to think sort of in broad categories and then we had some more specific ideas within those broad categories.

But some of the things we thought that might be helpful for the MPO to be considering as far as that additional work that we would be doing is some sort of policy research type of project.

Specifically, we had discussed looking at case studies on successful public and private partnerships where they were able to fund transportation infrastructure through leveraging private investment.

Best Practices for Supporting Climate Action Plans, which is a priority both for Albemarle and Charlottesville.

And also I think COVID is showing that there's a rise in remote work and one of Jessica's suggestions was to look at how more people moving to telework might shift travel demand on the system and what kind of

planning we might need to do around, you know, does peak demand change based on people not driving us consistently to commute to work, that kind of thing.

There's also always an opportunity to do some sort of more specific

by PED type of project.

We could do another phase of the equity work.

We had a lot of ideas around safety.

One of them that our staff was really excited about was looking at the relationship between safety outcomes and community socioeconomic demographics.

So thinking particularly like how do people that are in historically underserved like population density centers.

communities where there's a higher percentage of historically underserved population.

How are they able to safely access resources like grocery stores, clinics, pharmacies, daycare, schools, those kinds of things.

And is there a or documents more specifically what those safety discrepancies might look at in some of our areas.

I don't know exactly.

We haven't skipped that out, of course, but that was one that had a lot of excitement around it or other safety

types of things.

So these are just some of the broader categories and then some specifics within those broad categories that we wanted to throw out for initial suggestions and just see, you know, what, which, if any of these or other suggestions do you have that you might be interested in us pursuing a little bit more deeply.

I'm going to take a risk and say my number one concern as a professional planner is plans that get written and sit on a shelf and don't actually drive any outcomes.

As a topic, that would be something I would be interested in learning more about.

In our area, do we have plans that are suffering that fate and having a better understanding of if that's true, why is that happening?

Sure.

Yeah.

I'd like to take some time to think about that.

If you don't mind, I'm happy to get back to you in the next week or so, but I think that would be something I'd want to talk through with other members in community development and maybe even some other areas like our equity office.

It sounds like you've thought about.

I wouldn't mind maybe if you remind us of all of those that you've thought about to give us some ideas.

But I'd rather have a discussion before I make any decisions.

I don't know, would Chuck?

I mean, I mean, not spending.

You could put it in.

I mean, the other thing that we need to consider is when the census data starts to come out and how that's going to affect the MPO and

The area it serves.

We're probably going to have to look at some of that in the near future.

I don't know if it may be next year, but I'm not sure when that data is going to become available.

But I think to your point, Kevin, we can leave it in the first draft of the UPWP until the next meeting.

And I just wanted to jump in to note that I will send out some email summarizing what we've been talking about for this UPWP discussion.

And I agree with Kevin's approach to this.

It would just, I guess, the

From the city's perspective and kind of jumping off what Steven was saying,

Yes, we do have plans that are sitting on a shelf and aren't being instituted.

And it's because there's not enough funding available.

So I know the MPO has proposed asking for additional funds from both the city and the county in developing public participation plans for smart scale.

And that's going to be difficult to ask at this time.

So putting this additional money in the smart scale application is something that we'd be interested in.

If we need to come up with a new project that we're working on, then equity.

Ensuring that there's enough participation from all users, that all users' needs are included in our plans.

I have a question on the timing of the redistricting.

I believe the census population data is going to be available, Wood, Chuck, you can help me out in this, by next spring.

And so we'd probably be looking at a redistricting in the spring summer of 23 would be when we were having this conversation.

I've heard the redistricting file is like six months delayed at this point and it might affect, there might be some way to rush it.

I've seen some articles indicating it might affect the primary season in Virginia.

Gotcha.

Yeah, one of our concerns was about doing both a redistricting and a strategic plan at the same time.

So I mean, we had the same conversation internally as well.

I think it's a fair question and something that we can discuss.

I don't know how much work an MPO redistricting is going to be.

Probably a lot.

But yeah, that was one thing.

Chip's thought on this before, you know, when we didn't know that he was going to be leaving was it would make sense to sort of have this in place so we could bring the other communities on board, you know, sort of having better information and make sure that we're including them in the process.

You know, not necessarily as a voting member, but make sure they were involved.

Cool.

I have the projections, right?

I mean, we pretty much know, we're all talking around the edge, but we have a pretty good idea of what the change is going to be, right?

Yeah.

And it involves the community to the north and to the north of Albemarle.

So it just seems to me that we do have the information

the preliminary information to start planning, even if we're not.

I think the last I heard was that the census is supposed to be made public in September.

I'll also remind everybody that while there is the data exercise to this, there is the political part of this and that it's ultimately a decision of the governor's office on approving MPO boundaries.

There's probably financial questions too.

I mean, I wonder if Green is, you know, each both Albemarle and the city of Charlottesville contribute, you know, a decent amount of money annually to do this planning.

Is Green going to be willing to add to that funding to

With that, I'd also say let's be careful that we're prudently using the city and the county's financial resources and not putting them towards planning for green.

Yeah, and whether or not anything changes with the strategic plan to open up funding or not, I'd like to echo Jeanette in saying that I'd like to see an equity focus for any additional program.

I'm particularly interested in equity as it pertains to bike-ped planning.

There was a great speaker that came to Jefferson School a little while ago talking about how we often see bike ped as people like white people in spandex who are kind of like doing it for fun or whatever but the people who really rely on the systems are often minority and often in places where

You know, there isn't really sufficient infrastructure to make it safe and not skip ahead.

But looking at the bike headcount or the bike counts, you know, a little bit later on in our meeting, you know, it's interesting how the nonwhite shares are higher and often much higher than the proportional population for the intersections that are most challenging and and most dangerous, whereas like their lowest in the recreational places like Riverview Park,

So, you know, I'd love to see that as more of a focus of that overall.

Any other thoughts?

All right.

Thank you.

Great.

And thanks, Andy.

OK, thanks, Rory.

Let me share my screen.

So I just have three projects that one, well, I have something that's wrapping up and something that is just getting started.

So first, let's talk about the bike and ped count.

So the bicycle and pedestrian count was something that had been on our work plan for this year.

I really worked very closely with our bike and pedestrian committee, which is actually more of a bike and pedestrian working group.

And they, together we came up with a new focus for our bike and ped count.

So traditionally bike and ped counts are designed to like look at the entire region or look at an entire city and try to get a really good sense of like how many people are biking and walking in this entire region.

And what we did is refocus it.

didn't think that we had the capacity to look at like all of the MPO areas.

So what we did was pick a few locations in both the city and the county that either have recently had biker pedestrian infrastructure added or they're going to have bike and pedestrian infrastructure added in the near future so that we can look at this before and after the infrastructure is added and get a sense of how does that change biking and walking behavior in that area.

So we were able to go to, what was it, 10 locations in both the city and the county and did a morning and an afternoon count.

So these were done at the typical peak periods for travel.

So in the morning from 7 to 9 a.m. and in the evening from 4 to 6 p.m. Our volunteers just sat out there and counted people.

and they counted the direction that they came from.

So what you're looking at right now on the screen is the total for each location.

The first column is the daily number of bikes, the daily number of peds.

So that's really just adding up how many bikes and pedestrians were counted over those four hours.

The total of all our alternative mode users.

The number of women that went through the area and the percentage of the total people who went through the area that were women

Same thing with people who appeared to be under 16, people who appeared to be non-white, and people who appeared to have some sort of physical handicap or something like that.

This spreadsheet is on our website right now on our Bike and Pedestrian Transportation Planning page.

You can go and check it out.

You can also see all of the different pages.

So for every location,

There's a lot more detail.

So people counted, like I said, what direction the bikes and pedestrians were coming from.

They're coming either from the north, south, east, or west.

There are a couple of intersections that are a little bit more complicated than north, south, east, and west.

And that's clarified on those pages.

And then everything is broken down by 15 minute increments.

So you can really see when were people coming through and where were they coming from.

I didn't make any summary document or anything for this.

I think each of these locations, the information kind of stands on its own and it's intended to be used by the localities for whatever they see fit.

However, it helps them make

however it helps them plan.

We will go to these same locations in the spring, again with volunteers.

I'll put together the information in the same way, and then we can take a look at it again in the spring.

Tim, and feel free to jump in.

Always on these transportation and bicycle counts, I wonder why, and I ask this at SeaTac as well, it seems to me we have a national, international bicycle route through our region and that's Route 76.

And it seems to me that it should be involved in every count because it plays into a number of different categories beyond just transportation.

And we know that there are significant safety issues on that as well.

So, I mean, I think that others could say, why not see, why not drag it?

There are a lot of these other pieces.

Let me answer your first question first.

So you asked about a couple of different locations and why we didn't count there.

So recall that we had limited capacity to do the counts.

So we narrowed it down to these 10 locations.

And also the focus of these counts wasn't to really get a sense of how many people are going through the area total.

It was to really look at these particular places, because these are places

that have bike and ped investment or are about to have bike and ped investment in infrastructure.

And that's why we wanted to look at these places.

If there was someplace along Route 76 that had plans for bike and pedestrian investment in the near future, we would have counted there, but that wasn't a high priority for the localities.

And your second question was for satellite imagery.

That's just something I'm not super familiar with.

You have like some sort of location, like some place I could get that information from, Tim.

I guess we should talk to VDAT folks.

Right.

Trying to get in.

Sorry, I'm listening to the smart scale presentation.

Yeah, that's not, I don't know anything about that.

That's the streetlight data that we talked about earlier.

and we have included I think as part of the current information that they are starting to get the non-motorized vehicle count data as part of the information that we have.

You need to compare it to some actual data to aggregate it to make sure that it's accurate because in my experience in using the data it's

Not necessarily, especially when you have lower volumes, it doesn't predict it very well.

So I tend to use it on my very high corridors for vehicles, but I haven't really used it for bicycles or pedestrian, even though it has that capability.

And I don't know for our region if it would be

There'd be enough data to actually make it significant inroads.

Yeah, and just to tack on, getting bike and pedestrian data can be really, really tricky.

Even the automatic counters that you might have seen around town, which we use, well, the city and the county use, and VDOT.

Anyway, even those are not necessarily 100% accurate.

There's a lot of little quirks about them where, like, if you have two people walking side by side and they step over the automatic counter, it might only count once, so you lose, you know,

Half of your people for that time.

Just a quick follow-up.

I still, I guess I feel that

that a regional planning entity has the potential to do cutting edge things.

And I realized that this is a challenging time to be talking about that.

But when I was going to TRB meetings, Transportation Research Board meetings on a regular basis a decade ago, there were places around this country

jurisdictional, usually they were the planning districts as opposed to localities, and the state DOTs that were really starting to think about how to do number counts in all sorts of new and interesting ways.

And one was with the

phone data that Rory's talking about.

Others were with types of real feed video data that are being used by defense contractors who can pull layers of information off and sell it in some categories.

So I guess then this is almost back to your last thing of what might you do with some of those hours that are

Yeah, thanks for that suggestion.

Absolutely, I am on board with looking at better ways to count bikes and pedestrians.

I will just also note, even major metropolitan areas are still doing most of their bike and ped counts with volunteers.

And I didn't mean to imply that you're behind.

All right, I like it, Tim.

Yeah, to put my software engineer hat on for a moment, I kind of think that like approaching this problem to me, the obvious way to do this in the 21st century

is with like camera and video data and you know just a little bit of machine learning sprinkled on top probably with all the shelf libraries to like identify people and bicyclists but obviously that's beyond the scope of what you know TJPDC can do but you know one thing I might recommend is reaching out to the Center for Civic Innovation right up the street from you guys.

They used to host before COVID a Civic Innovation Day

which is sort of like a hackathon where people would work on things like that and they often like teams struggle for real practical tasks to work on so that would be maybe a great you know thing for that and not necessarily just for the hackathon but for they now have a code for cbuild brigade they call it that like works on different projects

Yep.

Oh, and I'd also note that I think at least two of these intersections are on bike route 76, the Emmett Ivey and the Ridge Main.

Thanks for that.

I'd like, I just want to briefly echo some of the things that have already been said.

I agree with Tim's ambition of exploring new things.

I agree with Chuck that there's limitations to street light.

For Rory's comment about the Civic Innovation Day, we were a project and I think it was really challenging to find, I think the scope of our project for civic innovation was too big.

And so we really didn't end up with something that was enterprise level and able to really go into full operations.

So that's just a word of caution I would put in about that.

I still think it's worth trying and seeing what we can learn and explore.

But I know there are also companies out there that already do vision analysis to do bike and pedestrian counting.

So at least knowing what a price quote would be, I think would be a very helpful starting point to know who's got the budget for that.

And then in regards to these counts that we've done, I just want to express an interest in the future that the bike and pedestrian is disaggregated from the rest of the data.

So looking at this and seeing that a lot of these areas have approximately 50% female observations.

But in my head, I think there's a bias that cyclists are primarily male.

So it would be helpful to know if this

50% gender split is the same for bike and ped, or are we saying a lot more male cyclists and a lot more female pedestrians?

Your point is well taken, and it was something that was discussed by the Bike and Pedestrian Committee working group.

I think it'll take a little bit of creativity on my end to try to put that all on one count sheet for our volunteers.

But yes, your point is well made.

And to be fair, I don't think a vision, a camera vision algorithm is going to have a very reliable time.

telling men from women.

So we might still need volunteers regardless of what solutions we have in the future.

Yeah, that's a good point about just off the shelf solutions.

Obviously, anytime you can just go buy something instead of trying to get some volunteers to do it, that's going to be preferable because volunteer work, well,

for software stuff can be difficult to wrangle.

I guess my question with this stuff is, is previous count data available somewhere?

Yeah, so there is count data available at least internally within TJPDC because they had done counts.

in several years ago.

They were done every other year and they were done repeatedly at some of the same locations.

I didn't find the data, the data that I could find on our QDrive and what I hope you weren't like part of this and I hope I'm not offending you.

It wasn't super organized in a way for me to just, you know, run with it.

It would have taken a little work for me to make sense of what had been done in the past.

So that was part of,

the impetus for us kind of refocusing this spike in ped count and creating these new locations and having this purpose of looking at, you know, how can we get this before and after data that's going to really be useful to the localities?

I think you're correct.

So that is one of the hopes with this new bike and ped count is that I'm working on really detailed methodology for how this count was done, how we're going to do it again in the spring so that it'll be done the same way over and over and over again.

And if the localities want to look at additional locations on their own, they can follow the same methodology.

If you haven't done so already, make sure you reach out to John Bozicek at VDOT central office.

Great.

Thanks.

And I just want to make one more plug for thinking about a major rural bicycle trail.

I'm on 53 almost daily.

And there are recreational bicycle folks from the region who use fortunes of Route 76.

But in the summer months, there are folks with their backpack camping gear on their bicycles every day.

And I think that this is where

We tie into economic development.

We tie into a lot of other categories and part of what makes us special that we still have these routes.

We also, just as we have a divide in this nation, we have a divide in people who are respectful for those people on those bicycles and people who are not.

And so there are significant safety issues and I'm not sure how you grapple with it.

And again, if this is not the appropriate place,

Yeah, so Tim, you bring up an interesting point that there is a lot of really great trail work going on in our region.

And Virginia has this great example of the Capitol Trail showing how a shared use path that is really long can contribute to economic development in a lot of different areas.

I would just caution that as far as I understand my role and the MPO's role, we are a transportation organization.

We're going to focus on

Bike and ped stuff that is transporting people to the locations in the MPO area that they want to go to as an alternative to driving.

And I would just say so far in everything I've seen, whether it's the Rivanna River project or whether it's the rural

Roads Project, I don't think that this nationally significant trail has been properly dealt with in any of them.

Tim, any other comments?

Because I do want to move on to one other update.

Great.

OK, so my other update, I'm just going to make this one.

Okay, so my other update is about transit.

So last year about this time, the TJPDC applied for two different grants with DRPT to look into transit planning.

One of those grant applications was for a Charlottesville and Albemarle regional transit vision plan.

So we said the purpose of this plan would be for local leaders, transit agencies, and a wide variety of stakeholders to collaboratively develop a clear vision for the future of transit in our region.

The work would result in a Charlottesville area transit vision plan document that identifies goals, objectives, strategies,

and time-specific recommendations for local transit.

And recommendations contained within the plan will be developed for short-term, long-term and extended long-term timeframes with the horizon year of 2050, which if I remember correctly, that is the year that both the city and the county's climate plans talk about going to zero emissions.

The budget for this trans-efficient plan, the whole budget is $350,000 with half of that coming from grant funds from DRPT, an $87,500 match from Albemarle County and another $87,500 match from the city of Charlottesville.

Overall, the project is expected to take about 18 months from as soon as the agreements are signed to June 30th of 2022.

All right.

This is a quick timeline for just the next few steps of the Transit Vision Plan.

So we are currently like here.

We are signing the agreements.

We are working on the MOUs.

we, or that I'm going to use with Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville.

We are finishing up the scope of work that will be sent out to, as part of an RFP to DRPT's bench contracting firms, hoping to do that just before the end of the month.

And then in February, we would be hoping to put together a selection committee that will review the proposals and select the consulting team.

And March is when we would finally be with the regional transit partnership group serving as the advisory group.

They will meet with the consulting team to approve a final scope of work and begin work.

So the second project is the Albemarle County Transit Expansion Feasibility Study and Implementation Plan.

So the purpose of this project would be to create a feasibility study and implementation plan for expanded transit service to population and employment centers within Albemarle County, particularly the Pantops area, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and along Route 29 North.

Innovative transit options to include on-demand service that emphasize accessibility and responsiveness to customer needs should be investigated alongside traditional fixed route options.

The budget for this project is $106,215 with about $53,000 coming from DRPT and the other $53,000 coming from Albemarle County as local match.

The timeline for this project is 12 months and it has to stick to 12 months because

The point of getting that implementation plan at the very end is so that the appropriate agency or organization can apply for funding to actually run the expanded transit service and they would need to apply for that funding in about January or February of 2022.

And again, I have a quick timeline for just what the next few steps would look like.

Similarly, we are working on signing the MOUs and the agreements.

We are finishing up the scope of work that's going to go out as part of the RFP again to the bench contracting firms.

February will have a selection committee.

that, you know, Albemarle County is going to be very, very involved in this.

They will review proposals and select the consulting team.

March is when an advisory group will be set or appointed by Albemarle County and TJBC staff will function as project management.

I've got one question on the Albemarle expansion plan.

So Monticello is a large employer.

That is what I was told.

Guys, I've only lived here for like a year.

And that was just the request of Albemarle County.

Good question.

I will also note that Monticello is right near the Piedmont Virginia Community College.

And I've heard, I mean, I don't know that this needs to be specified now, but the jail is somewhere without any transit service.

And I've heard that that is a need.

Okay, thanks for that comment, Rory.

I will add that the jail was recommended in the transit development plan that the city had approved last time to get service to.

It was supposed to go all the way down Fifth Street to the Mill Creek area there where the food line is.

So I'm not sure where that is, if that plan is being implemented or not.

The plan has been approved and exists.

I think it's going to be the base for the next study coming up.

We also have currently a consultant working on some improvements to implement

And something else I'll add is that with this ELMO project, if the consultant is looking at on-demand transit, hopefully they can leave us with a sense of not only is on-demand transit as a mode applicable in those specific areas that were mentioned, but

That's a great point, Steven.

Thank you.

Wood, did you want to

All right, any other comments or questions?

You can also always feel free to email me if you think of anything after the meeting.

The only other thing under staff updates was going to be the SmartScale scoring, but it sounds like, Chuck, we don't have any answers yet.

We will talk about that at our next meeting.

Thanks, Sandy.

Go ahead, Sarah.

Hi, guys.

Yeah, so just real quickly.

Wanted to let you know, obviously Rideshare has done a little bit of pivoting in our main focus this year with the pandemic.

And so we have been providing telework resources in conjunction with DRPT and Telework VA. We had some activities in the fall.

We were the keynote presenter for the Better Business Challenge with C3.

And we're actually gearing up to do another webinar

on January 26th.

And the main focus for this webinar and

kind of our telework initiatives moving forward is letting folks know, obviously, a lot of people and a lot of businesses implemented telework to stay afloat during the pandemic, but it's understanding how telework can work for you moving forward, how your organization can continue offering telework opportunities, how it benefits your business, and there are many free resources

that telework VA is actually providing to area businesses at their request.

And so it's going over what is available to the businesses to help them really make the best telework policy and program for everyone in their organization.

And it is a deep focus into what are your needs?

What are your goals?

Here's how you can achieve that.

Here's how you can evaluate if you're achieving it.

So that's one of the big focuses that we have coming up.

Yeah, next week, so soon.

I think that's all the update we have for now.

Sarah.

I just saw a note from Chuck that he does have some recommendation on smart scale stuff.

Yeah, Chad's doing the presentation now to the CTB and he just went through our district.

It looks like they're going to fund, well, they're recommending 20 projects for funding, which basically includes all of the Charlottesville projects, all of the Albemarle projects,

Three of the projects in the TJPDC and two of the Charlottesville projects, both Fontaine and Hydraulic 29.

The TJPDC projects were the 107 parking ride lot, the 29 shared use path, and the 5th Street hub and trail.

and basically all of the city and the county projects.

So that's good.

I mean, the money I guess went significantly up when they went back and looked at the budgeting over the past four years.

So we got money from every year of the plan that they're gonna be able to put into it.

So it may be that we could start some of these projects sooner too.

So these are the initial staff recommendations.

That's what the screen that I'm looking at, there was like 20, we had 36 projects submitted, 20 of them were funded.

Excellent.

Well, now we're going to have to find new projects, Chuck.

And I posted a screenshot of that slide at the CTV meeting in the chat with the list of projects.

Great news.

We'll be busy coming up the next four to five years.

Well, Chuck, that was a big surprise.

I'm shocked myself.

I didn't realize that there was an additional $100 million, or it was a significant amount.

I'll tell everyone that Chuck has been tempering my expectations for like six months now.

And I'm so I'm just very surprised.

I'm pleasantly pleasantly surprised.

Well, OK, so that concludes our staff updates.

I did have some time set aside for roundtable, but I'm just going to request that everyone keeps in mind that we are supposed to end at noon.

Great.

So a little hard to go around the room, but I guess start with county people.

I don't think we have any updates at this time.

I'll just share that we're really excited about the SmartScale announcement.

If that goes through, that's really tremendous news.

So thank you all.

Sure.

Reminder to all the MPOs, blanket reminder we're giving that on the transit side of performance measures, the public transportation agency safety plan related measures are due to be adopted by February 7th.

DRPT's six-year improvement program was published on our website on December 9th.

Available there, folks want to take a look at what we've awarded in the way of funding and grants on the transit side of things.

Our current grant cycle for transit grants, this is capital operating along with some of our specialty grants like technical assistance,

is open and we have a deadline of February 1st for those grant applications to be submitted and completed.

There's a federal COVID relief bill that includes some transit related funding.

This is very similar to what we saw in the CARES Act.

More details are to come.

For the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, DRPT continues efforts to stand up that authority.

They have a scheduled meeting on January 25th of the board.

Additional information on VPRAs on our website.

There are a lot of exciting things kind of happening around that and the rail initiatives, ongoing negotiations.

and things related to kind of all those big announcements that you've heard related to Virginia's historic growing of their rail investment and rail program.

Thanks, Wood.

Nothing major to report.

We're going to start classes up again, starting at the beginning of February.

And I don't know, I can't even tell you if the buses have been operating, UTS has been operating on a

Different schedule than they were when classes are in session, but I do know that it's highly modified from our normal operations and taking buses off of McCormick Road for the time being in terms of where students are able to kind of go from where they live to grounds.

And the reason for that is to

avoid the large crowds that tend to occur on McCormick Road as people wait for buses.

So I do know ridership for UTS down significantly because of so many people not coming to grounds for classes, though they are taking classes just not on grounds.

And then most of the bus

Logistics and operations are geared towards getting employees from where they park if they have to be on grounds to especially the health system.

Take that as a no.

Great.

And Juwan, any cat updates?

Yeah, we have quite a few things going on, but that's probably one of the bigger ones.

The APC, the automatic passenger counters,

should be on board in a few months.

Well, no, we should have the contract ordered in a couple months or so.

But yeah, a lot of the other products, you know, like I said, we have a consultant on board looking at our routes and schedules and how to tweak that.

Also, you know, McCormick Road is hurting us as well.

Our trial ridership has fallen drastically due to that.

But some of the more times to previously mentioned stuff, in looking at tweaking our routes, we've noticed that we are able to reduce loop times just because there's less traffic on the road.

So, you know, I think we're all kind of operating on, yeah, code is going to go away at some point and we'll be back to quote unquote normal.

But what is normal?

And I guess that's something

I don't know if anyone can predict, but we're trying to keep our eyes and ears open for how to handle that when it comes.

But we're tugging along.

Yeah, passengers, counts are low, but you know, I think that's just nationwide.

Thanks.

Well, we awarded the four, what do you call it?

State of good repair bridge.

So you're going to start seeing some movement on that.

It is allowed to be scheduled for over a year on the four bridges.

So just be aware of that.

And then Belmont has just been advertised, which is super exciting.

And now that we have funding for West Main, looks like city council has a difficult decision on their hands.

Definitely.

I've got nothing to add to that.

Yeah.

I don't have anything to add.

The only other thing that I thought I had mentioned in light of Timmy or comments about the longer trail is that there is a regional effort underway to evaluate our participation throughout this region, including in the rural areas of the Three Notch Trail.

So at this point, the TJPDC, we're kind of not really in the lead role on that since

It's not really clear what our participation would be right now.

It seems like it's much more of a recreational trail effort versus a transportation corridor.

So we don't have a well-defined role at this point, but we are supporting the efforts that are underway.

There's a lot more that's going on with the parks and rec staff are a lot more

plugged into that right now.

But as we do our long-range transportation planning updates, including the rural long-range plan update, we'll make sure that any recommendations that will support that get included.

And if there emerges a more, I don't know, specific way that we can support it, that fits within sort of our scope of what we do as an agency, we'll certainly be open to that.

But otherwise, we'll, just to get most likely,

Thanks.

You know, there are just a number of things that are in flux in these times.

We know that the governor's put in his budget the money to support the two really long length trails in the state.

And with UVA Foundation putting all of the land,

East, under conservation easement, then there's a great connector piece possibility along 795 that would connect a lot of the way, the potential for connecting a lot of the way from Morphin back to Monticello.

And you all are aware of studies that UVA classes have done in the recent past about that.

So just things, because again, you're the regional planning,

and because we're talking about the fluke banner component of that as well to be thinking about.

I certainly understand the distinction between those that we hope are going to be commuting and those that aren't.

Cool.

Well, did I miss anyone?

I might have not heard you call my name, but no major updates at this time.

Great.

Well, thanks so much, everybody.

With that, I'll adjourn this meeting.