MPO Technical Committee Meeting   3/21/2023

All in favor?

Alright, so we're going to move on to the public here.

Do we have any members of the public who would like to direct the committee?

Move on to general administration.

Second.

I second.

Alright.

Do we vote on that?

approve this agenda.

Say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any additions to the agenda?

All right.

And then next, we're going to move on to the approval of the January 17 meeting minutes.

Can I get a motion to arrive?

I move.

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed, say nay.

Oh, okay.

I'm in my office over here in Avon.

Let me put that in the muscle, you're in shit, bro.

Yay for allowing one to result.

Yay.

Yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay

Alright, moving on to our first item, Transportation Improvement Program.

Yes, I'm going to turn it over to the same example group.

I don't know if I can have a discussion.

So, I think most of you have probably been through this process before, but just to provide a little bit of background information.

Okay.

The TIP is really sort of the implementation of the projects that have been identified in a long-range transportation plan.

So this is the MPA's opportunity to approve the actual expenditures of funding for projects that have already been identified as priority initiatives.

The purpose of the TIP is to schedule the spending of federal transportation funds within the MPA region.

So it's a four-year spending program that's updated every, it's actually updated every three years.

So what that means is that we are currently in the fiscal year

The schedule of anticipated expenditures are provided to us by the transit agencies.

So Don and Kat have provided

what they expect our expenditures to be to manage their transit programs.

That is our opportunity to review that as an MPO and to say that we approve those expenditures and then that is passed on to DRPD as a communication of what the transit funding is going to be spent on within our region.

And then VDOT provides us the anticipated expenditures for the roadway infrastructure and other transportation service transportation related projects.

That's all based on the formulas that they use to determine when the spending is going to be in different groups, which we'll talk about, as well as any any projects that have been approved through the six year improvement program.

So most of the projects that are called out in reference specifically have already been approved through another initiative.

And so this is showing that those funding are going to be programs over the next four years.

Projects of regional significance are pulled out and shared individually in TIP boxes.

So I'll show you an example of that in a second.

And then projects that have similar funding categories are grouped together.

And the reason projects are grouped together is because that gives more flexibility as far as having to make adjustments to divert funds from one project to another within those group fundings in order for the agencies to be efficient in providing maintenance and improvements to the roadway system.

So just as an example, these are a couple of tip boxes.

You can see that top box is a regionally significant project, which means that there's a specific project description.

And so if expenditures are going to be adjusted from one fiscal year to the next, or if that amount is going to be reduced or increased for any reason, that is going to be specifically communicated related to that project.

Whereas the bottom table shows an example of a group project.

So it's a general category of maintenance and preventative

system preservation, so that's just one example.

And so this is going to contain that kind of funding for any number of projects, and this gives the state and VDOT some opportunities to move projects around or move funding around from one project to another as long as it's all within that group.

You will receive a copy of the draft transportation improvement program in your pocket.

Sure.

So after the check was released, I went back and looked at the spreadsheet and provided a lot of jump and cap and released some form of those until I got a team report.

The table that's shown, these tables that are shown on your screen now those are

updated revised numbers.

John has approved their summary, so I'll check back at that for their approval, and we'll give this update to the Policy Board.

Other than that, I think there's one project where I think I missed something I fixed for Nate,

public engagement procedures both in the federal regulations as well as in our PO adopted public engagement plan.

That means that we will post the draft tip on our website in April for the minimum 30-day comment period.

We'll also make sure that we are sharing information that the tip is available for review by the public on our social media.

and then we will be conducting the required public hearing at the MPA policy board meeting in May.

And so at that point, at that May meeting, we'll be asking the policy board to take action on approving that plan.

We'll be asking you all for a recommendation either to approve the final draft of the plan or to approve it with any specific revisions that you will identify.

And then just because they agree with the plan doesn't mean that we're done with it.

Throughout the year or throughout the lifetime of this plan, there will be adjustments or amendments that might be needed.

So we'll be bringing those back to you as necessary in order to make sure that those any sort of those changes are all processed.

I do have a question on the adjustments that were made to that slide.

The CAT funding sort of seems to go in a curve.

I'm wondering why the out years would be much lower.

Like are we anticipating a drop in federal funding for that?

I am not.

Yeah, OK.

Why does it have something to do with the fair and free?

How that's funded for several years and then it's not?

Yeah, that's through a state funding source.

So there is a drop in that state funding that could be part of it, but there's also, I'm seeing a drop in that FTE.

There's also one in 33 of stuff that

It seems kind of surprising, so you might want to talk about that area.

Thank you.

There's a question there.

Okay, hearing none, we move on to our next item, which is another standing schedule.

Yeah, just to give you a little bit of background information.

The U.S.

Planning and Work Program is basically the work program that the MPO developed, communicating what it is that we are going to be undertaking with the funding that we are provided from FHWA, FTA, as well as the state agencies to support the regional transportation coordination and planning work that we are tasked to provide for the region.

80% of our funding comes from federal sources so that's FHWA and FTA each give us an allocation every year and then the state sources make up 10% of our budget and then the local sources make up another 10%.

In FY2023 the budget for the MPO activities went a little over $500,000 but this was a little bit unique because it also included some rollover funding from the school year FY21 and FY22.

And then the funding that you will see in the work programs also shows that there's a line item that's called VDOT SPR, that's VDOT State Planning and Research, which is an additional funding line item for VDOT to pay their staff to support the MPS program.

So that funding does not come through our MPS.

So what has happened in the last couple of years is that we have had some pretty significant changes in our staffing, which has caused a little bit of a lag in getting our staff up to date.

And there's also been some increases in the amount of funding that has been available for these different programs through the cost allocations.

And so that's created this opportunity for us to

used some of this for pass-through services instead of direct costs.

So one of the things that we did with this rollover funding was that we retained a consultant to support us with the long-range transportation plan.

There are two types of rollover funding.

One of these is passive rollover.

So any funding that we don't use this year that we don't specifically say we want to use next year will be considered a passive rollover and that will show up again not next year but in two years.

So if we don't spend down all our funding and we don't communicate back to the state or the federal agencies that we would like to have that funding available, we'll see it again in FY25.

Otherwise, in order to move some of this funding that's available that we don't anticipate using in FY23 and FY24, we have to go through a deobligation, which is what I'm going to be asking you all to do today.

So there are two line items that we identified up front.

And when we approved the FY 23, you know, by planning work program that we knew properly would not be spent in FY 23.

One of those was to support the 2050 Long-range Transportation Plan.

So we retained a consultant knowing that some of those services would be provided in FY 23 and that some of those services would be provided in FY 24.

So one of the de-obligation requests is to roll over the expected balance of what our contract is with the consultants from what we expected set in FY23 so that we have it available in FY24 to complete the planned work that we have already set in motion with this.

So that amount is $72,643 that we would deliver for that specific night item.

The rest of the funding and the amount of $32,357 that we are requesting for active rollover is in this phone call service that we got for you.

What happened last year that some of you may recall is that after we had drafted our original youth side planning work program, we got an updated cost allocation from VDOT that increased the amount of funding that we received and we did not have planned activities for those.

So we put those into an on-call services category in order to support other initiatives that might come up or determine what the best strategy will be for applying those funds to other programs in the future.

So as anticipated, we did not spend all of this down, so we are also asking to roll over an additional $32,000 from that on-call services.

into FY24 so that we can have that available.

What I think is really important to note is that neither of these rollover requests are going to impact any planned activities that we have committed to completing this fiscal year.

These are all things that were above and beyond or were anticipated would be rollover expenses from the get-go.

So what I'm asking from you all today is for a recommendation on whether to approve this active rollover request so that those $105,000 could be rolled over into our FY24 event name or program.

I think there are many supporters.

All right and the next one will be for my planning work, Adrienne and Sandy.

So looking into FY24, we will be asking for an approval of our FY24 work program at the Policy Board meeting also in May.

So this is a chance to talk about what the identified tasks are from our staff that we plan to undertake in FY24 to provide us with any comments or feedback on any adjustments or revisions that you might like to those for us to incorporate into the development of the final work program.

So as I mentioned, the amount of new funding that is estimated that we will have available based on the net cost allocation through that line item, this is $257,644.

And then we did have a little bit of passive rollover from FY22 and then, assuming the policy board follows your recommendation and approves the active program FY23 funding, we'll have this additional $105,000.

So that gives our total amount of funding for the PL, which is the FHWAZDOT side of the work program at $387,000.

And then we don't anticipate rolling over any of the funding from the FTA and DRPT side.

So we'll have another $129,000, which is the CASA allocation that we received for FY24 from them.

So, the VDOT SPR is estimated at this point that this won't affect the work program budget, it will just affect the final, the final calculations that are in exactly as with the final UOW.

So looking at what we have drafted as a task for FY24, a lot of these are pretty similar that we have a standard line items in our work program.

So all of the administration tasks are reporting and compiled regulations, committee staff and information sharing is pretty similar.

I will note that we have added some additional funding to this information sharing line item because some of you may recall that we went through a comprehensive website update for the TJPDC 2020-21.

We would like to go ahead and update the MPO website as well to be consistent for NOD and pass through the functionality that the PDC website also has.

So that line is a little bit higher than it normally is.

For the big long range transportation planning projects, we will be continuing our work on the long range transportation plan.

This comprehensive safety action plan item is intended to support the development

of the safe streets and roads for Auburn.

So this is funding for our staff to support those initiatives beyond what has already been identified as part of that grant.

I also want to mention that one of the requirements from the FHWA is that at least 2.5% of our NPO planning funding needs to be dedicated to supporting complete streets initiatives.

So the development of this comprehensive safety action plan also meets that requirement because we'll be looking at safety improvements to support the development of the whole thing.

We were hoping to complete this boundary analysis to evaluate whether or not there are changes that need to be processed for the MPA boundary in this fiscal year, but we are just now receiving information or will be not to receive information from the state on that information.

So it's likely that that work will need to continue in the next year.

As you all know, we have the ongoing transit governance study that is looking at what a potential oversight and funding opportunities are to support some of the transit initiatives that we've identified in our region.

And then there are going to be next steps after that to try to follow through and implement any of the recommendations that come out of that Transit Governance Study.

So this is generally intended to support the completion of that governance study, but also follow up with any next steps that may be needed.

And we are also including funding for the Comfort and Safety Action Plan, the Transit Governance initiatives.

For this next item, the Commuter Assistance Program's strategic plan development.

and the MPO work program and the Rural Transportation Work Program.

The Commuter Assistance Program strategic plan is a requirement from DRPT for any of the Commuter Assistance Programs throughout the state.

So we have applied for a technical assistance grant, but this will also support the development of that plan.

And then we will need to be working with VDOT on updating our regional travel demand model.

The short range of transportation planning are pretty much the same categories that we typically include in our work program.

So that would be maintaining the transportation improvement program, supporting the smart scale, supporting the multi-metal system planning, so that's the regional transit partnership, travel demand management, and bike path planning, and then processing the federal requirements like the performance targets.

Do the community assistance program and the tribal man model count towards the total?

Yes.

Why is it different?

Oh, right.

Yeah.

They do count towards the total.

That's just the error.

Um, I don't know if this people's going to get, but it is perfect.

For our next item, moving toward 2050 updates, it's Sandy Andrews.

So we were hoping that we would be able to go through kind of a demonstration of what the prioritization process worked like.

And I don't think we're quite at a point where we have some other organizational priorities that we need to go through.

But we do have some of the graphics to show what this process is going to look like that have been prepared by the consultant.

So I can walk through that really quickly.

We've been talking about this a lot in here, so I'm not going to go through in a lot of detail with the background information unless you all have questions about that.

But we have completed the final report, or I should say the consultants have completed the final report with the finalized methodology, and they have developed the geoprocessing tool that we're going to be using.

So we are actively working.

We have time scheduled where we are regularly meeting to work through just familiarizing ourselves with that tool and making sure that we understand the data inputs and how all of this works together.

And we will continue to work through it, but we're not quite ready to go live with that yet.

So this is just going to show kind of what the output or what the interface is going to look like.

So you'll recall that we had these categories when we were developing these performance measures.

to help us identify where the system priorities are going to be.

I don't have these compiled, so when you put them all together, you'll see a map like this that's going to show a compilation of all of the different system priorities that are kind of as they overlap with each other.

So we have priorities for safety, we have priorities for congestion, we have priorities for access.

We're going to put all of those together, and that's going to show where our network priorities are going to be.

but it's a little bit premature to do that because part of what those outcomes are going to look like is dependent on how much weight we want to give to the different performance measures and we haven't determined that yet until we go through some of the public engagement.

But this will show you what the interface looks like.

So every need category that we have is going to be standardized on a one to seven point scale and we're going to go through this analysis and so when there's

So this one just shows the roadway safety needs.

This is the pedestrian safety needs.

We'll have some decisions to make on which of these thresholds that you may recall when we look at it.

at the report that was included in your packet.

There are different ways that we can measure these.

So for pedestrian safety needs, we can develop at the district top 1% of identified corridors where there are safety needs, or we can look at the district top 5% of relief for the two thresholds.

So we'll need to make some decisions, and we'll work through that at future meetings.

But this is just sort of to give you a little sense of what the interface looks like.

The access to JAWS need,

and I think one of the questions we had that has come up a lot that I probably have a better answer for is the difference between the access category and the land use category and specifically if you look through the report, the access is really helping understand how people are already trying to get to work which and work in this case is kind of a proxy on how people are trying to get where they need to go but it's really looking at moving people from where they are to where they want to be

and determining where there are opportunities to improve access.

The land use, the land use evaluation when we look at the report is really focused on connecting non-work destinations together.

So creating really strong network connections where there are important community destinations that aren't necessarily related to employment.

So there's a little bit of a distinction, but I would say the land use is really more about connecting the destination points together versus connecting people

to where they are trying to go.

So that's something we'll need to continue to work to communicate.

But really, I just wanted to bring this back to you all to sort of show you what the memories look like, because I know that that was a question, but if there's anything specific you want to look at, I'm happy to do that.

But otherwise, I would say that our next steps are really to

focused on conducting the public engagement, and then we'll spend some time working through which of the threshold we want to select, and then we'll start putting all of this together.

Yes, Aimee?

Okay.

So we have also gone through a similar process in the city.

I think we were working the same in school back then.

So I'm curious, Aimee, if you

If you look in that report, it's not necessarily a sensitivity analysis, but what they did was they sort of showed what the different thresholds would prioritize, if you use one threshold versus another.

So there is some framing to it, yeah.

Um, I don't, I I don't know that the methodology is necessarily the same, but I think they could take the information that's produced from a map and overlay them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Any other questions on?

Yeah, I've got a couple of real ones.

One, I noticed, you know, there's a long court at Harvey,

limited to what the roadway improvements are, but I think that's going to come up in the land use requirements.

And I think that other thing that we're really evaluating, I mean, you're not going to see, you're just not going to see a lot of these, um, a lot of these metrics that apply to, to the, to the MIPED projects, for example, like the safety issues probably won't show up as a MIPED project.

I think for the BIPED projects, though, those are something that we're going to have to pull out separately that we're just going to have to say may not be captured in this process.

I consider those outside of this process.

Yeah, I don't know if that's going to happen in the same process, but I think that that's something that as a region and as the continued planning work that we're doing, I think that's something that we're going to have to be having conversations about.

So also, this is actually the first time I'm getting to see the images of someone having this thing.

It's harder to have a conversation about it.

So being like, yes, some of that stuff, what we'll need.

Is this going to be available today?

Well, we haven't started working on the tool yet.

Are these things still moving?

On the threshold, the analysis would be, I mean, you've gone and set up a whole series of variables that are going to be part of the analysis.

So it should be interesting to see how those variables play out in a little more depth.

Or is this that?

We don't have any choice.

The thresholds were provided to us as recommendations by OIP.

We haven't made any decisions about this.

They have provided us with some options and recommendations on theirs.

But I haven't made any decisions.

This is something that I'll be bringing back to you all to help walk through how do we make these decisions and which of these do we want to use.

For weighting the categories and also which of the different thresholds that they've developed.

Do we want to apply?

Do we want to use the 1% or do we want to use the 5%?

We haven't made any decisions around that yet.

Fair enough.

People should bear what we have.

We've been given to do our assessment on.

But to assess with a very good thought.

I mean, even look at what the information is and understand the information that you're looking at.

I mean, what I have is, I have a guide here that basically talks about

What variables do you pick?

I don't really understand the balance going into there and I don't really understand how the data plays out.

Well... Do you think you can manipulate?

I wouldn't say manipulate.

I just don't understand.

I mean, I've been

We haven't had a lot of experience using the tool.

I mean, we're just now using the tool too.

The information that I've had, I've shared with you all, which is how, what is the process that we're going to use to develop the tool?

They developed the tool and now we have the tool that we're working through.

So the information that I've had, I've been bringing back to you all so that you all are hearing about it as we go and are forming the decision making.

How people want us to establish this.

It's like, okay, so you just shared a tool we developed.

and here's the tool, where we use the tool.

But in the creation of the tool, I haven't been able to watch it happen.

I don't understand the sausage that went in.

Well, we put in the sausage making here.

I've got a report here that's got a very long report, it's going to be very much in there.

But it's hard to understand how that plays out without looking at it.

You've got a GIS platform.

It'd be nice if you had a little one, you just finished it and sort of

I'd like to be able to see what this thing is and what it does.

What I'm telling you right now is that we haven't worked through the functionality of that yet ourselves.

So before we can sort of walk through anybody else's data, we have to make sure that we understand how the data feeds into it and making sure that the tool is set up and that kind of thing.

The discussion of what the primary role that you've been here talking about a little bit earlier is that

Okay, so that might actually help explain how this is working.

And the variables, just to be clear, these are related to performance measures that we talked about back in November.

Yes, yeah.

From a practical matter, I think it has a similar concern.

So what we're looking at here is kind of a current state.

Right, so just in terms of the formulation of the tool and how you implement the tool, so is it going to have a functionality so as we develop, begin to change developments or comprehensive plans or how we're going to densify or

is this tool going to help to do that and evaluate the networks, the walkability?

Probably, it's not probably going to be that

robust as far as being able to use it for modeling purposes.

So this is really capturing where the needs are based on the existing system.

A couple of exceptions, one of those is that access to non-work destinations has a function that's based on the population group.

But this is not modeling new changes.

You know, it's not based on projections.

It's based on existing system operations for the large part.

And the reason why we talked about that is we have this discussion is that it makes sense that if there are identified system needs right now, it makes sense to focus on those and then

when we get to the point that we're developing what the right project is to address those, that's when we start looking at what is the right project to address the existing need, not just right now, but for the future.

So it's really just focused on here's some problem areas and let's prioritize where we're going to spend the money.

But it seems like it shouldn't be that much of a stretch to make it into a

To that point Louise, we are also going to use the regional transit model to look at this, but what the regional transit model is going to capture is mostly conduction based on the growth projections.

It's not going to capture a lot of these other system analyses.

So we'll be able to see what the model says and kind of use that as a way to evaluate against what this has shown as our priorities and that may inform some of the decisions we make.

So it's not built into this process, but we'll be part of building for transportation.

Actually, there's not a part of the lower transportation sector.

Yeah, so just to go through and give you all a little bit of an update.

As you remember, we talked about holding some stakeholder discussion groups to

provided a first-level review of the goals and objectives that we had drafted.

And so we were able to schedule three different meetings with the business community, and then we had a meeting with the public safety personnel, and then we had a meeting with community partners.

And we prepared a technical memo that was included in your pockets that just explains a little bit about what we heard from those and what suggested changes that we

The purpose of the stakeholder feedback was to inform how the information will be presented to the broader public to revise in the language around the goals and objectives and then make any changes to how the goals and objectives are kind of proactive or whether or not we need it to happen.

So this is just a summary of the original draft goals you might recall.

Safety, Environment, Equity and Accessibility, Land Use and Economic Development.

One of the most important or significant changes is that I think going forward we would like to really take a much

a comprehensive view of two key priorities that have been identified, you know, at the federal level and at the local level and making sure that it's clear that those would be integrated within the development of the other goals and objectives.

And that's related to the climate action initiatives and equity.

As we were looking at how to evaluate the differences in priorities, it became really clear that the climate action initiatives was not really just about measuring one performance measure related to

related to emissions reduction, but it was really showing up in a lot of different places.

How do we make biped infrastructure more comfortable and safe and create felt safety for those?

How do we improve accessibility related to alternative ways of transportation?

How do we support transportation that supports efficient land use, those kinds of things?

So climate action and equity work

were both major concerns that were showing up throughout the evaluation of the different goals and objectives.

So I realized that it's not as clear as it needs to be on the memo, but I wanted to make sure that I highlighted that we are not removing the importance of climate action or equity from the goals and objectives, but instead what you're saying, these are shown for it, that these need to be considered throughout.

So the safety, there weren't a lot of changes to the goal itself, but the red lines show where there are suggested changes from what was originally presented to you all related to any of the changes in the goals and objectives.

So we talked about the original language of reducing the frequency and severity of crashes, but

thought that after thinking about it a little bit more, it's not necessarily the frequency of crashes themselves that are concerning when it comes to safety, but it's really about how seriously injured or impacted people are from those crashes.

That is really what we're trying to achieve when we talk about safety.

So we changed this to reducing the frequency of serious injury and fatal crashes.

And then there's also a lot of feedback from stakeholder groups that they didn't really like the terminology for alternative modes of transportation.

They thought that that made active transportation and transit fields secondary to single occupancy vehicles.

So we tried to change how we were referring to the multi-modal transportation system and not even those alternative modes to

sort of reaffirmed the primary importance of single occupancy vehicles.

So the first bullet kind of focuses a little bit more on maybe the particular impacts on the second bullet while it refers to the multi-middle transportation system with a little bit more emphasis on the transit and active transportation.

Alright, for the environment, as we talked about, some of these objectives were really kind of redundant because we're talking about improving multimodal transportation opportunities throughout the goals and objectives and then we're talking about reducing behavioral emissions.

That's going to come up later when we also talk about system efficiency and reducing congestion.

and so we took those two bullets out of this and this is really focused more on managing the physical impacts of the transportation system on a natural built environment.

This one is probably the one that you know looks a little bit concerning is we don't make sure that we're really understanding that we're using this equity framework approach but really like I said we're trying to say that we don't

what to call equity out specifically in any of these categories because we want equity to be considered throughout the categories.

So we changed accessibility to improving access to greater availability of resources that are affordable and efficient.

And we specifically are going to make two jobs and opportunities because that was another piece of feedback that we kept getting over and over in the stakeholder groups is that there's too much emphasis on jobs and economic opportunities and they really wanted this to be more about

general access to any destination that is important for a member of the community.

And then we're focusing on increasing road choices as part of that accessibility.

We're evaluating the direct road choices that people would have.

The land use and economic development is probably one that we need to continue to work on.

We were trying to really communicate that we wanted to help support the development of an efficient transportation system that supported land use that would help people limit the types of environmental impacts and really start connecting some of these community destinations together well so that people could use a variety of modes in order to get from one place to another within

you know, the designated growth area.

So I think there's still some confusion around this one, but if you all have any questions or feedback on it, I'm certainly open to suggestions on how this one can be more clearly communicated to the public.

And then the last one was about efficiency.

I think there were some qualifiers on here that felt like it was a little bit different from the others, so we tried to remove those to be a little bit more consistent.

as far as the style of improving roadway system reliability through operational improvements, increased system capacity at identified bottlenecks.

And then we moved the full bicycle and pedestrian connectivity gaps because it felt like efficiency for an active transportation user would mean that there's consistency in the network that they were using.

And while this will not be an evaluation, also maintaining the existing system in a state of good repair,

feels like they should be part of the efficiency considerations.

Well, one of them you cut out the transit element of it and then I kind of thought it would show up somewhere else.

I thought it might show up in that efficiency of the input.

We cut out the transit.

One more.

Yeah.

What I mean by operational improvements is intersection reconfiguration, probably coordination, etc.

Yeah.

Any other questions on the stakeholder discussion and reach that ground?

We can move on to smart scale round six.

All right.

So I think again, everybody probably is pretty familiar with this, but smart scale is the big, big process that we use to get funding for infrastructure projects.

And round six,

Applications will be submitted in August 2024.

Under the current process, the MPO can submit out to four projects, just like each of our localities, as well as the TJPDC.

I think one of the caveats is that this process is also under state of evolution, so we don't know what new requirements there might be for the next round yet, but as far as we know at this point, we have four projects that we could continually submit.

In order for projects to be submitted through smart scale, they must meet eligibility requirements.

The first one means that they have to meet a need that has been identified through the statewide transportation plan, which is referred to as V-Trans.

And then for the MPO projects, it's a little bit different than the localities.

The two types of projects that the MPO is eligible to submit are projects that support improvements on the corridors of statewide significance or projects that are identified as being part of our regional network.

So one of the things that we do is we typically will coordinate with the localities to figure out what the overall projects are and who is eligible to submit what kind of projects.

In the previous round, round five, we implemented a new process to support the development of applications early.

So we selected the projects that we wanted to

that we wanted to move forward pretty early.

We identified projects that needed some additional support to prepare for applications.

So we did a lot of work on urban coverage.

And then we did that public engagement in time to develop a scope that we used for the project application.

So for round six, I think we still want to identify our project priorities early and determine the projects that may need additional development prior to the application submission.

However, there are a couple of things that are a little bit different for round six going in.

And one of those is that the projects are in a different phase of development.

What this means is that we, in the 2045 Long Range transportation plan, we have other sub high priority projects that we refer to as being on the constraint list.

and we don't have one list of outstanding projects that have been developed through previous planning initiatives that have not already been submitted.

So we kind of had this list queued up.

These are the priority projects that we hope to get implemented.

We've worked through, applied for a lot of those and we don't have one list of projects that haven't been through some level of application at this point.

So we are currently working on developing our new

is a queued up list of projects that we want to move forward, but we're not at the stage where we have those ready to go and ready to move forward as part of this next phase of project development.

What?

Which process is that?

With the long range transportation plan.

Yeah.

No, I mean there are a couple of different initiatives that are listed out there.

So there's Long Ridge Transportation Plan, there's the State Street Plumbers' Program, there's the VDOT pipeline projects, we'll talk about those in a minute, and then the localities out there and projects that they're working through as well.

And all of this will feed into sort of developing a list of potential projects that they would want to do forever.

Yeah, so we're working on keeping up that list again, but that's not already established yet.

And then the other difference is that for the projects that we already have that have remained unfunded that have been identified as priorities initially need a different type of support.

So it's not necessarily the public engagement that's needed by some additional support as far as scoping the project and doing some more of the technical development work on this project in order to make those a little bit stronger for future announced.

So one of the things that we did was we reviewed the unwanted projects around four and five of smart scale and this shows the list in this top category right here.

Just looking at what projects might make sense to consider for a recent mission for this next round because these are projects that have been identified as high priorities for our region.

The two projects that are shown in black here, the others are grayed out, are the ones that probably have the

most opportunity to remain the highest priority to move forward at this point.

The district avenue roundabout at hydraulic road has been identified as really high priority and it actually scored 31 the last round of smart scale.

It was kind of a little bit of a fluke because it was submitted by the MPO and scored better than some of the other projects that were funded out of the district.

funding pool versus the statewide pool.

So there's probably not a lot that needs to be done for that project.

So we're being competitive in future rounds and hopefully, you know, part of it would depend on what the other projects and missions were in that round.

Can I ask about your line job as everybody else?

Is there a benefit to that project being submitted by the jurisdiction and not at the MBO or for the state funds?

Do you want to say anything about that, Jessica?

I think you're totally right.

And the Fifth Street project that the MPO submitted did not score very well, but it is an important project because there are a lot of safety concerns on Fifth Street specifically.

So this is one where there might be a good opportunity to work with VDOT to look at what kind of adjustments we might be able to make to the scope initially and pull out pieces of that that might be able to reduce the project costs in order for that to score better.

So that's one that we might want to also put a little bit more time and effort into evaluating to determine if that would make the high priority invisible if you want to work on for a round six publication.

And then VDOT also has two pipeline projects that they're initiating.

which is two projects that impact U.S.

250, so that's U.S.

250 in Barrowshire, and then Ivy Road that includes U.S.

250 Interchange.

And I apologize if these graphics did not make it into your packet, but they have provided a couple of web pages.

If there's any questions, I mean we're going to basically look at this is Barracks Road.

This was submitted round three I think by the MPO.

We're going to relook at it as part of the pipeline process, and then possibly and hopefully we can get resubmitted to look at bike and pedestrian facilities from Georgetown all the way into the city as well as

making some improvements at the interchange to better improve the functionality.

I know we've got queuing in the northbound off ramp that's backing out onto 250 that we want to try to address.

But basically, that's what we're going to try to do with this project.

As you can see, there's a lot of

needs along this corridor, both for pedestrian and transit, as well as capacity preservation.

Sorry, I had a little trigger.

I'm happy you checked.

Yeah, this is the other one.

We've had a lot of issues going on here.

I know that traffic engineering was looking at the Old Ivy Road portion with the ramps and stuff on that north quadrant of the project, but we're going to focus mainly on the interchange and south

and the 250 corridor.

We did a STAR study a number of years ago, but we really haven't implemented any of those recommendations.

So we're going to reevaluate that section.

We also want to look at what we ultimately need to do at this interchange.

In previous long range plan updates, this has come up as a possible concern, this corridor of 250, 29 and 250, because of the capacity constraints that it has.

and there's a lot of issues with this interchange.

The bridge is too short, so we can't extend the acceleration and deceleration lanes for the partial cloverleaf.

So we want to try to look at how we can improve that and what the ultimate solution needs to be here to address all of the future needs at this location.

The county is also expressing concerns about this section south of the interchange, and that's why we included it because of the median is really narrow and it tends to flood.

and cause safety hazards along that portion of the road.

So we definitely want to look at that too.

So basically, these are getting ready to start probably in April sometime.

And we will be having stakeholders groups, meetings, as well as asking for public input as these move forward.

So more to come.

I have a question.

It runs from St.

Hans, which basically the city line in the east.

It does include that intersection, but we weren't really necessarily looking at Old Ivy Road per se, but we're going to probably end up looking at it and discussing it as part of the scope.

because traffic engineering already did that study there already.

We could look at that underpass to see, but we're definitely going to look at the intersection at 250.

And again, this is going to include your transit and bike

combinations too as part of this process.

I know it shows up as the V-trans needs are listed there and it doesn't list all of them.

I listed only the highest ones, but there are needs for transit as well as a bike and pedestrians.

So really, I think at this point, you know, we're talking about what we need to do to prepare to have strong applications for around the same smart scale.

And the recommendation that I think makes sense the most is that we support the development as the MPO, given that we have a lot of these other initiatives that are underway where our staff is going to be putting a lot of the time is that our

Our capacity is going to be directed towards further developing projects that have already been identified as important than we have pipeline projects unless there are other initiatives that you all identify that you want us to consider for project development in this phase.

That we need more of them at this point.

I mean, only because they're Ivan Bridge, you know, there's been so much talk around it and this idea that maybe one of the reasons it didn't score well is because it was such a wide range of costs and it is cost kind of like

Are there other findings and policies that can occur, or are there some additional work that's being done in order to be expected?

Well, I think that the Hillsdale South Extension was also part of the U.S.

29 Dental, and I think the challenge with that one is that I've lost a lot of my acquisition.

It's a really expensive project, and I think there might be some benefit in waiting to re-evaluate the broader area before we move forward with doing anything else.

Just to provide some background, the Hillsdale South Extension was

intended to provide an extension of Hillsdale from the hydraulic road intersections out all the way to 250.

So that was just an expensive project, and I don't know that there are a lot of opportunities to reduce the scope of that enough to get the budget to a place where it would be competitive.

Yeah, it will close some of the ramps at the current interchange on 250.

They will be relocated, mainly the eastbound off-ramp and the westbound on-ramp, at least from part of it, that loop ramp coming out of the city.

So the northbound to westbound movement will be relocated.

So those ramps would be closed and relocated to this new location, which could provide right away for redevelopment, but we would have to make improvements to holiday, as well as building the extension between the

Kroger's and the old Dominion Power site, which is going to be required right away and figuring out how to work the trucks deliveries for Kroger's was a question that came up several times.

But it would connect to the roundabout that's already funded for the hydraulic 29 interchange.

or hydraulic Hillsdale interchange.

So that was all part of it.

We will it would include bike and pedestrian facilities along it down to not necessarily 250, but at least two holiday and probably connect over to the existing facilities that are coming along 250 on the north side from hydraulic.

But like Sandy said, there's a lot of

right-of-way purchase, so it drives up the cost.

And with the current state of right-of-way, it would even be higher than what we actually submitted it for last time.

So it's significantly higher.

And that was some of the questions that came up when we submitted it before.

So that's why we wanted to hold off until we started looking at the corridor a little bit more.

I know we're probably gonna have to look at 29 North again at some point.

So those are all going to come back.

I have two questions.

For the history extended, one of the recommendations is to look at the position of re-scoping that.

In a re-scoping, can you submit two different applications for whatever is re-scoped?

I believe you can.

Can you track?

Yeah, that was one of the teaching PDCs submitted that was really developed kind of as part of that pipeline project and I think if that remains something that, you know, especially the county is supportive of it might make sense for us to resubmit that.

I think we're kind of, that was the TJPEC submittal project, not an NPO submittal project, so those are typically what we use to support requests from the additional localities.

Not to put Albemarle on the spot.

Hey Sandy, the only other thing I would want to point out is we do have that 29 North corridor study that you may want to consider also.

I don't know if there's anything in it the county or the MPO would like to consider moving forward.

All right.

So also, the City of Charlottesville update.

I'll steal a little bit of the past thunder to start before I end it off and go on.

We are currently undergoing our alternative fuels study and see how we went through the cat from diesel to electric, battery, CNG maybe, hydrogen maybe.

So we are currently working through a bunch of different scenarios and different fuel types and different

operating costs associated with those would be, as well as what the emissions impact would be, presumably reductions in emissions.

Our consultant working through sort of the hard math, and we'll be taking that out to the stakeholders in the next month to get their feedback on the analysis.

We also interviewed consultants last week to start our transit strategic plan for PAT.

this is a state requirement for larger transit agencies around the state that they put together a transit strategic plan basically saying this is how we plan on spending the state's money so we'll have that done by I believe December is the date so it's going to be a quick turnaround for us we're going to be relying really heavily on the system authorization planning act completed 2021 as well as the regional transit study regional transit vision plan

I'm not a student.

Our Safe Routes to School programs are shifting from looking at more infrastructure improvements that they could implement to help kids get to school safely to more programmatic things.

So you may be seeing some events pop up in the next month or so.

We had one this past week that was a bike-prepared workshop over here at Friendship Court.

And next week, we'll be having our bike-prepared party for city schools, which is basically we take all of the bikes to the city schools at home

Bring them all to Green Lodge Brewing over here.

And how are you preparing these little bikes for kids?

Free beer, bring them tools.

It's a lot of fun.

I had to talk a little bit earlier about the non-loverization prioritization process, so bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Part of the structure, not being smaller, but actually

concrete, something for bike lanes, but, uh, we had worked through the quantitative.

I want to know that looking at all of these different variables and now we're looking at it sort of qualitatively and looking through project by project to see if what came out of that quantitative analysis makes sense and make sure that the projects that we're recommending are actually feasible.

I know we can do them in a sort of quicker time, um, because a lot of these projects have been on our priorities since 20th edition.

Uh, so we kind of want to see if there's a timeline for actually getting something done.

So that's what we're looking at this month, and we'll be working with stakeholders in the next couple of months to vet those priorities as well.

We are currently under legal review for the changes to our innocuous permit program, so our scooters.

We have been working with the vendor for the past few months to iron out how we might need to change some of our regulations.

I'm pretty sure we're going to get this legal review okay and get those regulations passed and then we'll have to apply for a new permit in which they will have to do some things that they haven't been doing in the past few years.

That permit will be managed by our new bank type coordinator which I have in place next month.

We are wrapping up interviews for that right now.

So hopefully next month we'll have both new regulations for our scooters and some of the family stuff at the same time.

Very excited about this.

More fun updates to share.

I'll pass it on to the Academy next.

Yeah, let's see.

We've been working on some early conceptual design studies.

to help us get better cost estimates for future projects.

So we are wrapping up our Free Bridge Lane early conceptual design project and we got board approval to plan a pilot program to turn Free Bridge Lane into a promenade.

So we are working on planning that pilot program right now.

Today we are kicking off our Route 20 shared use path conceptual design project.

So we are revisiting a previous MPO project to look at the potential for a shared use path along Route 20 from a city to like Dairy Barn Road.

and we'll be doing a site visit today and we're having a stakeholder meeting that includes the city and other stakeholders at the end of the month to release that audit.

Coming up in early April, we'll give our quarterly report for transportation projects and Alberic will give his first presentation ever on the secondary six-year plan.

We wrap that up so that we're not going through whatever channels of hierarchy and talent that has to be going through.

It's going to be April now.

Okay, cool.

Good thing.

And then we also are working on

updating our transportation project priorities, but I don't think that we're going to put that goal probably in the next few weeks and months to get that done.

So, you know, framework of what projects you want to work on the most.

And then, anything else?

And I have a question.

You said to Derry-Barbera Road, where did it start?

Sure, we've got the pipeline studies which we talked about earlier.

We also have some STAR studies going on where Michael's working with the localities on their project selection for the TAP and revenue share.

We're also looking at

gearing up for the next round of smart scale, which basically we're trying to focus, work on that so we can bring it out to localities this late spring, early summer.

Yeah, I just mentioned the project selection process.

We'll talk with you all about the presentation back in January.

It's going very well.

We're working on eight projects with most of the localities in the northern part of the district.

We've gone into the site visits, we've done preliminary alignments that were going to be given back to the localities.

Hopefully next week we've been in a lot of those issues with some folks and help with the VDOT.

And it's been great because one of my things about it is some of the bulk here in Green County they were like

It's great to be on site visiting with road engineers to see how they look at the issues that happen in the field.

So it's kind of a good way to help develop projects.

We'll be moving that towards better acceptable plans and estimates prior to the application.

Again, we love to be able to work with you all to help shape your projects and help do them.

not just planning components, engineering components, trying to create that different back and forth between the planners and the engineers as it may work well for you all and the projects that you all are doing.

So, the last thing to say is smart scale, as Chuck said, we're working on some of the safety stuff.

We hope to extend the same process to smart scale applications, especially ones that are more

in the urban area, of course, on the trip here.

So, people will hold a series of competing engineering issues, conflicting ones in the types of planning issues.

So, very excited about the process and hopefully we'll be having some, both, big, successful plans and let's go pair it with documents to really tie together those planning and engineering elements

later this summer, we won't be able to look out and sell to a lot of districts.

Actually, one thing I forgot, I've been telling you, um, we have a state first of school kind of thing to talk about, happening for Roper Elementary, April 17th.

So we're going to kind of, while we're on the beat on it, kind of identify, I guess, transportation issues that kids face, kind of walk our way to school, and that will be coming next year.

will eventually give us a report that would be used to kind of think about different parts of what I have to focus on for the night.

Well, if you didn't buy it, we'll even talk about the lead-off that the residency offers.

Have you had a long that walkabout?

Have you had some site visits?

Okay, yeah.

I mean, it's the same parts of schooling, a lead-off that will be there as well, so if you want to explain.

No, but that reminds me that Wood Betson is no longer our representative for DRPT because he is moving to be the manager of the new feed ad trails program.

So that's part of the TMPD office, I believe.

The microtransit is out there so Kat has put an RFP out for microtransit service and that is currently out in the wild so hopefully we'll get some good bites on that.

I had a chance to talk to Barry and get a clarification on those

TIP funding decline and that's due to the ARPA and CARES funding going away and so that all comes through the 5307 that's why you see the numbers dip there and the capital of 5339 that's rolling stock so we are near future buying a lot but I guess by 27 that's gonna dry out a bit and hopefully we won't have to do big bus purchases for a while

Sounds good.

And then you can jump on there.

New year.

Yeah, just a couple of things.

I guess on April 1st, there's a new director of business services starting.

Coretta Harris is coming.

Grandview University, I think, in Michigan.

So she'll be overseeing the Department of Transportation department, really amongst the students.

But that was from which you could imagine.

Another thing I just wanted to mention, you may have seen them,

at UGA where faculty and staff could submit ideas for good ideas towards sustainability.

And the winners were, one of the winning groups was actually transportation-related.

Patrick Clark, who works at P&T and even HEAL and works in the sustainability office, they put together a proposal for what they call Commute Club, and it's kind of like a reports program for faculty and staff who

and you know it seemed like a great idea and you know on the face of it but there's a lot of details that we get work out so maybe we received a hundred thousand dollars to have a pilot's program so that'll help kind of you know create an allocation essentially and an methodology to how to give these rewards to make the right choice so that should be rolling out over the course of the

As Cindy had mentioned, we, in addition to submitting our operating grant to DRPT, also applied for the technical assistance grant to complete a strategic plan.

We are rolling into a busy spring with bike month coming up in May, as well as some

More initiatives and advertising devoted to Earth Month and Clean Commuting, which you'll probably start to see shortly.

And then briefly, Afton Express, of course, has launched their expanded service that started in February.

and I do have February numbers.

They have still been averaging right about 58 passengers a day for the month, so I've definitely seen good improvement there.

UVA offered a really lovely promotion for their employees to buy passes and fare cards, and they saw really great results from that.

So we're looking at possibly implementing some additional strategies and doing that again as

next year's academic year will roll back around since it was so well received.

Awesome.

Great to hear.

And that's all the other things that we have today, any matters from the public?

OK.

Thank you, everyone.