MPO Technical Committee Meeting   8/15/2023

Eric Carina Luis Carrazano Christine Jacobs Sarah Bennington Bill Palmer Dave Blasey DeJuan Lee Taylor Jenkins David Cook Tiffany Dubinsky Michael Barnes Tony Choi

Richard Duran.

Donna Chin.

I just want to open by adding there's another paper crash in the video area on Thursday.

Just want to remember the work we do here is important and it affects people's lives.

Donna, unmute it for a second.

I think that was a good response.

Thank you.

My name is Peter Krebs.

I'm from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

We have a nine-county service area covering really the 29 and 15 corridors from Albemarle County to Albemarle County.

I work mainly here in Charlottesville and Albemarle.

I'd like to speak for just a second about smart scale.

We've been concerned for more than a year about the direction that smart scale might be heading.

And what I read in the packet last night confirmed some of our concerns.

Broadly speaking, there are two areas of concern that I would simply be interested to

have the MPO here and be working on it in whatever way it can.

Number one is the decrease in funding or decrease in products for bicycle, pedestrian, and transit projects.

This seems like exactly the wrong direction for the Commonwealth to be moving, especially in this moment.

It seems like every indicator you can think of

suggest that we should be doing more projects, not fewer, to provide bicycle and walking transit.

Secondly, and this is the one that we saw coming in for a long time, is the de-emphasis of land use as a factor or even the elimination of land use planning as a factor.

I think we really need to be clear that reducing congestion or increasing the velocity of vehicles is absolutely a land use decision.

Unfortunately, it's a regressive land use decision.

And we think it's important for localities and MPOs to be able to take into consideration their own growth goals rather than assuming growth and sprawl are good things.

That might have been an appropriate modality in the, we'll say 50 years ago in the 20th century, but that's not the way that at least Charlottesville and Albemarle seem to be thinking with their comprehensive plans.

So simply, I would be interested to hear MPO thoughts on A, whether

this needs to be the way it is, or B, if Smartscale stops being in a preferable need to encourage more sustainable transportation, what other vehicles might be possible, or what venue avenues might be pursued to get this work done?

Simply building more roads, it's not gonna help things, and that's sort of what the new

Thank you very much.

All right, are there any other members who would like to speak?

I guess we'll have to skip general administration topics if they're available.

Um, we don't necessarily need a quorum, but if we, if you want to wait, it probably is helpful to have more people part of that discussion if possible.

Okay.

Let me find my place in the PowerPoint side.

Let's go with the Long Range Transportation plan.

Okay.

So before I start, this is really going to be a bulk of our discussion this morning is talking about the thresholds that we want to use for the evaluation of the Long Range Transportation Plan.

But before we get started, I just wanted to give you all a brief update on where we are with our public engagement.

I forgot the metrics I shared with you last time.

But at this point, we have had contacts or some sort of response or opportunity to receive comments with over 500 individuals at this point.

We had the stakeholder discussion groups back in February.

We did our open house and our virtual meeting.

We have 313 responses from our MetroQuest survey this morning, which also includes over 1100 map comments of people who are either identifying opportunities for improvements or system needs.

To date, we've had our staff has been present at nine different

public engagement intercepts.

So that includes outreach at the transit center, working with CRHA.

We're in the process of attending all of the community advisory committee meetings.

We've attended, or we've worked some outreach at the center at Belvedere, and we attended both national night out events for both Albemarle and Charlottesville.

And so through those discussions, we've had personal discussions with nearly 160 community members.

So our goal for the public engagement for the entire process was probably about half a percent of the MPO population area.

That's just under 700 people.

So this is just the first phase.

There will be another phase of public engagement once we start identifying the project priorities.

So I think I'm pretty pleased with where we are.

I think we're making a pretty concentrated effort to make sure that we are

reaching out to more vulnerable users as part of how we're targeting our in-person engagement, but just wanted to share that update with you all at this point.

We're hoping to close the survey.

Well, we will be closing the survey at the end of August.

That doesn't mean that there won't be other opportunities for public engagement.

It just means that at that point, we need to start using the feedback that we've received in terms of evaluating the system needs.

So any questions on that before we get into the more technical discussion?

No?

Okay.

All right.

So you all may recall that we worked with the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment.

We received a, what's called a growth and accessibility planning grant through them.

And that helped us develop this process for developing a prioritization process, both to prioritize our system needs, and then also to prioritize our system projects.

So just to take you back a little bit to last fall when we were discussing this in more depth, the general process is that we're looking first at identifying where the highest priority system needs are based on our established priorities.

And from there, we're going to use that to identify what are the projects that seem to meet our highest priority system needs.

And that will help us start developing our list of candidate projects for consideration on our constrained or high priority list.

And then once we narrow that list down a little bit, then we'll start working through the prioritization of projects themselves.

And so those projects are projects that have been identified through other planning initiatives or efforts.

So things like comprehensive plans, things like the VDOT pipeline studies, things like small area studies that are conducted either through

you know, a county initiative or maybe another planning initiative like with the TJPDC's bike plan, something like that.

The other thing that this is going to help us do is when we identify the needs, we're also going to see where there may be a really high priority need that doesn't have a project matched against it.

And so that's going to help us identify where our priority planning efforts need to go.

So that's the general process that we're talking about.

I know it's been a little while since we talked about this.

What I want to emphasize is that we were having conversations about this in the fall.

So all of that feedback that we discussed that you all gave me when we were talking about that in the fall was communicated back to the consultants as part of this process and has been considered in terms of developing this prioritization and the measures that we're going to use.

This is focusing on the data that we're going to use to assess the system.

So I also want you all to keep in mind that we're going to have this assessment of the system based on the data performance that we're receiving, what can be measured with the data.

But then we're also asking for feedback from the public right now as part of this engagement on where they see a need for improvements, where they're having problems.

And so those are both going to be incorporated when we identify where the high priority needs are.

Any questions on general process?

All right.

So again, just to sort of help set us in contact, what we're going to do is we're going to be establishing performance measures within each of our needs categories.

And then we're going to go through a process that's kind of similar to SmartScale, whereas each need is given a raw score.

We use a raw score to kind of help us assess how an area, what the needs are.

And then that's going to be standardized to a seven point scale.

and then those are all going to be standardized together.

So this is a way for us to take different kinds of metrics that are being evaluated and different units of measurement and put them together to help us figure out when they're stacked together based on how much we decide as a region we want to prioritize each of those different goals or objectives or measures that helps us find the areas where there's the highest combined need across all categories.

We're going to go through all of this in detail, but this just shows where the performance measures, what metrics have been developed for each of the goal categories or what the performance measures are that we're going to use in each of the goal categories.

So a couple of things that I want to emphasize.

To the extent possible, we consider multimodal transportation or multimodal transit system.

operations.

So for safety, for example, there's a roadway safety and a pedestrian safety category.

So we wanted to make sure we are capturing

the mode discussions.

And then we also wanted to, when possible, also considered the equity impacts.

And that goes into that overall framework that we were establishing in terms of using that equity frame or that equity lens in evaluating these.

Some of the equity considerations are going to be more explicit, like there's a performance measure related to accessing jobs by disadvantaged populations.

And some of these are going to be more implicit.

meaning that, for example, pedestrian safety, one of the factors that is considered using the measure that we're using for determining the pedestrian safety priorities, already factors and vulnerable road users.

So I just want to also mention that because it's going to be more apparent in some places than others that equity was considered.

So we're going to go through each of these and, you know, we pretty much have the majority of the time today to talk about these.

We don't have to use the full time, but really what

what has occurred is that for each of these performance measures, the consultants develop two different thresholds that we could use to determine how we want to start prioritizing the needs.

So the thresholds are going to use, basically, I think that the way that this makes sense in my mind is they're going to say, what is the universe of potential needs that we want to start considering for a score?

So if a project or a need or a location falls outside of that threshold in that potential category, they're not going to get scored at all.

They're not going to show up as a need when we do the analysis.

So really, we're just trying to start by saying, what do we think qualifies as a need to even be evaluated and considered for each of the performance measures?

Does that make sense?

We can talk about that more, too, as we go through.

All right.

So we'll start with something that's fairly straightforward.

The first thing that we're going to that we need to make sure we're capturing is where are their safety improvements.

And so what we are doing is basically we're going to select a threshold for which of the potential for safety improvement thresholds we want to use.

And again, that's going to determine which projects or which locations are considered as a need for the purpose of moving forward to the score.

The potential for safety improvement just defines which locations we're going to consider.

What's actually going to give those projects a score is basically doing this equivalent property damage only crash frequency analysis.

So basically you multiply the number of crashes times the equivalent property damage only

weighted value and those with the highest EPDO or equivalent property damage only values are going to be the highest priority projects.

This is using SmartScale values for EPDO.

So I know there's some question about whether or not these are the right values to use, but this does give us some opportunity to align at least this particular score with the way that SmartScale evaluates

their safety priorities, but we can also use different, we can change the values if you all have feedback on what you would prefer to use instead.

So the two thresholds that were suggested by the consultants in developing this grant is that we can either just use all PSI intersections and PSI segments with three or more crashes in a five-year analysis period.

So that's basically anything where there is

I don't know, Michael, if you if you have any feedback on how PSI is determined, but it's basically using sort of a predictive model to determine how many crashes they would expect to be at an intersection or on a segment.

And so PSI is determined by areas where there are more than what is expected.

So there's an opportunity for potential for safety improvement of those areas.

So the recommendation is that we can either start with considering every segment or intersection where there's a potential for a safety improvement within our MPO area, or we could limit that to the top 10 miles of segments and top 20 intersections within the boundaries.

So the implications would be that if we're going with the first threshold, any

area, any location where there's an opportunity for safety for a safety improvement would be evaluated and given a score versus the second threshold which would just prioritize the most severe locations or areas.

Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly both threshold is.

But again, it's really crashes where the number of crashes that they see at those locations exceed what's expected.

I believe that's how the potential for safety improvement calculations are scored, but basically there's a ranking and I don't know exactly how many others, but it goes until like the hundreds for the TJPDC region.

Right, so if you use this top threshold right here, what's going to happen is that these top 10 miles of PSI segments, the ones in the second threshold, will receive a higher score than any of the ones that aren't within that threshold, I think.

This shows a map.

So this is all PSI segments.

So basically the lighter the yellow or the darker the yellow, the brighter the yellow, I guess I should say.

Those are the ones that would receive like those higher scores.

So basically what would happen, I know these maps are hard to see.

Basically what would happen is if we use that first threshold or that second threshold where it's just limiting it to like the top 10 segments in the top 20 intersections, you would see a reduction in some of these.

You wouldn't necessarily see the same

like segments showing up, but you would see the ones that are already bright yellow would stay bright yellow and there would just be less of a network of safety locations too that would be included in the analysis.

Anybody want to push back against that?

Yeah, so the ones that are at the top will be at the top regardless of which measure we're using.

So is there like an administrative benefit to like categorically excluding all the very low ones?

Yeah, no, I think because the ranking is all going to be processed through like a GIS analysis, so it's not going to be like a manual processing.

I think probably from my perspective, it might make sense to start with more safety improvements, you know, from the universe, because even if it doesn't necessarily

significantly impact which projects are prioritized through the process.

It gives us more opportunities to identify where there are safety concerns in our area, which could have good utility for other initiatives that we're undertaking and also just help us best align where we have projects ready to queue up that can meet some of these needs.

It's a way of, it's a piece of my iterative, I mean, not quite understanding how it's going to play out, the process, and do the back.

Yeah, thanks.

I mean, again, this is just sort of giving us a starting point to have the discussion.

So we could also start with the thresholds.

And I think it's more of like a policy decision.

Do we want to focus on the most severe areas and only the most severe areas?

Yeah.

Yeah.

We get to be, you know, we get to probably do this process and make sure things get out of the universe even better.

And I'm just saying, yeah, why not?

Yeah, no, I gotcha.

Yeah, that's a good point.

I mean, I think I want to be conscientious that we're thinking through, like, what are the priorities without thinking through, like, what are the specific projects?

Another way to put this, I don't have a strong priority to get into this.

I am still trying to figure out what it looks like.

we're going to do with each tree, right?

And the forest is fine, but if we come back and the question's up, we need that analogy.

Okay.

Well, we'll start with focusing on all of them first and then if we feel like that's not, um,

if that's capturing maybe a lot of areas that we don't necessarily consider having significant concerns, maybe we revisit that later.

All right, so the second measure is talking about the pedestrian safety needs.

And what this is using is, this is using the PSAP or the pedestrian safety action plan that was developed by VDOT.

And what I found out is that the most recent version 3.0, even though it's still positive, pedestrian safety action plan does include bike crashes as well.

That was not true for the first versions one and two.

So basically the PSAP, it does show crashes, pedestrian and bicycle related crashes, but it goes further than that because relative to overall system safety concerns, there's a relatively low number of bicycle and pedestrian crashes overall.

So it also uses a predictive measure to determine where there's a high propensity for people who

need to use some of these pedestrian corridors or need to be able to access different areas outside of a single occupancy vehicle.

So that consider things like where are there activity generators within the area?

What's the population of households without a vehicle?

Those kinds of things.

So there is an equity consideration built in to determining where the highest priority safety pedestrian corridors are.

It also considers the design of the transportation system.

So things like the design speed, number of lanes, et cetera.

So based on this map or based on this process, there are a couple of different priorities or levels of priority that are identified through the pedestrian safety action plan.

And so if you read through the

the report that was provided.

It mentions the top 1% or the top 5% of corridors and talks about statewide or district.

And then if you're looking at the top 5%, that would include the blue areas.

And those are all of these.

The red and the blue are also considered in the district top 1% segment.

And there were only a couple of additional intersections that were included in the district top 5%.

So basically we're choosing between do we want the red network and to focus on pedestrian improvements in the red network, or do we want to use both the red and the blue networks, both the 1% and the 5%, which would include the top 1%.

So basically based on that decision, it's do we want to focus on largely pedestrian needs or pedestrian improvements that would facilitate access along

Yeah.

I thought this would be a short discussion.

Yeah.

And so this shows, this is the top 1% for the districts.

But I think, like I said, I think this map is incorrect.

I think the metrics are using working correct.

The multimodal accessibility.

This one I'm going to spend a little bit more time explaining because it's a little bit harder to wrap your mind around.

Yeah.

Yeah, this was just developed as a PowerPoint for reference by the consultant.

So, you know, it's not part of the practical conversation, I guess, but like, you know, with that map, and it's kind of scoring safety needs in general, they're based on

which to me seems a li

But then yet, like the whole power over, you know, really has that need because it's it's not useful.

Well, so it's not the piece up for itself.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, my guess is that like any segment that had any sort of like or had a crash because I'm sort of able to show up here and then you just cross reference maybe that the map and you know, I

I hear that, I agree that maybe like a segment might, I think, well, you know, if we're talking about scoring, we may want to delve into that because yeah, it might draw a segment down, but it's unduly long compared to another segment.

And there is a heat map on PSAP too.

It always starts with richness.

We're going to talk about the actual waiting and things like that at our next meeting.

So really, we're just looking at, as a general policy, how do we want to prioritize these things to start off with?

And again, I don't want us to get too hung up on the data, because the data is a tool, but the data gives us a starting point to have a conversation.

and we're going to go back and say, you know, based on what we based on the decisions we made about how to analyze this and the data that we thought we wanted to use, does this seem reasonable based on what we know about the system and based on the public feedback that we also received?

So this is the Charlottesville area.

And you look at it, there's something called application planning, B.DOT website, new management information,

I don't know if that's publicly accessible.

Yeah.

No, you can't, you can from us.

I don't know if the public can get a sign in for it.

It shows like the bike head crash heat map.

So, I mean, this is what it's showing up right now is the heat maps.

I need a username.

Yeah.

But the other thing I want to mention is that for some of these, so this is capturing one set of data, but for some of those things like where there's a network gap, there are going to be other measurements that we are also capturing those in other ways.

So there might be other proxies that are filling some of the gaps that any one of these measures by themselves may not quite adequately be capturing total.

So any other questions on the pedestrian safety?

All right.

So what we what we tried to do was, we wanted to really focus on how or what is the

sort of capturing what is the opportunity to improve accessibility for different communities of people based on different travel modes.

So working with the consultants, they developed this multimodal accessibility measure, which is using sort of access to jobs as a proxy to say these are areas where you can, where there are a lot of opportunities to get out into the community and buy these different modes.

And these are opportunities where

where we can make it easier for people to access different parts of the community.

So this is measuring access to jobs, which is a little bit different than the land use score, which we'll talk about a little bit later, which is measuring access to community destinations.

So this is using jobs sort of as the frame of reference for where are there opportunities to improve access.

So I'm going to walk through this a little bit.

It's a little bit complicated.

You all probably don't need to know this in as much detail as I'm going to go through it, but just for the sake of being able to explain it, I'm going to show you how we are developing what we are referring to as a potential for accessibility improvement.

So we have a potential for safety improvement.

This is a potential for accessibility improvement.

So each of these little blocks right here represents a census block.

And the number within the census block is showing the number of jobs that someone could be able to get to from that census block based on whichever mode of travel we are using for this analysis.

So this first reference block shows, so there are two different conditions that we're considering.

The first is a high stress condition, so in this case we're talking about bicycle improvements, and then the second condition is a low stress condition.

So for all of the jobs that are within a

that are basically listed in this number that are listed within maybe, I think for bicycles, it's like a 10 mile area.

So assuming you can get there within about 15 minutes or so.

If you include all of the jobs that would be accessible under really high stressful travel conditions.

So there are hills, there are high traffic volumes, maybe there aren't dedicated bike lanes, things like that.

Under the high stress travel conditions, a person in this block can get to 98 jobs.

And if we only consider the low stress travel conditions and how many jobs are accessible under those very low stress travel conditions, this person could get to 88 jobs.

So that difference between 98 and 88 is where the transportation network is potentially limiting the number of jobs that are accessible for someone because of the level of accessibility that it would require to reach those additional jobs.

So that is occurring for every single one of these blocks.

and the census block.

So each little square represents a census block, and we are doing this for every single census block at the same time.

So the first thing that we do is we subtract the number of jobs you can reach under the low-stretch travel conditions from the number of jobs you can reach under the high-stretch travel conditions.

And that shows what that potential accessibility improvement is going to be.

So the next thing that we're going to do is we are going to multiply that by the population in order to get a population weighted potential for accessibility improvement.

And we're going to do this for all of the blocks.

And then we're going to add those all up together within the maximum travel distance.

And we're going to divide that by the person weighted accessibility for the entire study area.

So this is the population.

This 10 right here, this is the population within that census block.

This is the difference in how many more jobs could be accessible under the high-stress travel conditions compared to the low-stress travel conditions.

We multiplied those together.

Each block, you're multiplying 80 times four, 92 times eight, et cetera, throughout this whole area.

And then we get this population-weighted potential for accessibility improvement.

So that's for that whole area.

So we do this for each of those blocks and we add it up.

This is the total for that whole area.

So that's the area that's within that, whatever we define as that travel radius divided by the population.

And we get this number 5.26.

So that is our weighted potential for accessibility improvement for that block.

So we could think of this as like the MPO area or the travel area.

And so 5.26 is the

population weighted opportunity to improve accessibility for this area.

So then what we want to do is look at what kinds of roads are being served or are going through the census block to determine what types of population density or what kind of travel density we might expect.

And so there's this multiplying factor that is defined based on the different type of road type that goes through that block that would potentially provide access.

So the idea is that there's a potential for accessibility improvement along a principal arterial that has an opportunity to improve the travel for a higher number of people, because there's likely to be more of a population that needs to have improved access along that principal arterial compared to maybe a major collector or minor collector.

So it's bigger roads, more people would likely benefit from an accessibility improvement there.

For anything that's a limited access facility, we're just using that as a zero.

We're saying we don't want bicycles on that, so we're taking them out of the criteria.

Those probably wouldn't show up as an accessibility improvement.

Those might be a preferred solution to one of the needs that are identified here, though.

Trails should, I would assume, trails should show up under the level of travel stress one, right?

That would be a pretty low stress travel condition for most people.

So if there's a trail that's operating, that should show up under the reference condition.

So again, this is just defining a need.

This is not identifying the preferred solution.

And so you take that 5.26

score, and we're going to multiply it times whatever the roadway type is that is providing the access to those census spots and multiplying those, and that gives us our raw accessibility need.

And then we would standardize those across all the needs that are identified within the region.

Or it has a much higher opportunity for an accessibility improvement if it's not accessible already.

So each of those little census blocks is going to sort of have a score.

And so the other thing you need to, so the places that are being scored or the places that are lit up a little bit brighter, those are places where those areas have a greater need for access to jobs.

you know what he's wanting to do right now.

I mean, comparatively, again, these maps are just examples, but yeah, comparatively, that's what that would say is that the areas where there are the highest or the highest opportunity for an accessibility improvement would not be in the Rio area based on this map.

So keep in mind what we're measuring that was the potential for an accessibility improvement.

So what that means is that there might be a lot of jobs there but there might not be as high of an opportunity for that accessibility improvement in that area.

So we're basically doing something similar for all different mode types.

We're doing something similar for transit where we're sort of comparing a reference condition against sort of an idealized condition.

So for transit, the idealized condition would be what if transit was just as efficient as driving in a car.

For vehicular movement, we're doing this for vehicles as well.

So for automobile access,

What is the accessibility improvement if all the time the roadway conditions were what they are like in free flow traffic conditions?

And then we're also doing this based on a disadvantaged population.

So instead of multiplying this times the general population in each census block, we would focus on the populations that are identified in equity emphasis areas, which are determined by the state's V-trans as areas where there's a high number of vulnerable road users.

So the question for this one is that the two thresholds that were developed is would we want to focus on all segments where the population weighted potential for accessibility improvement is greater than zero.

So again, anywhere where there's a potential for an accessibility improvement, do we want to include those as a potential location to receive the score?

Or do we just want to focus on maybe the areas where there's a greater than average

potential for accessibility improvement.

Okay.

For all of the measures?

Okay.

Anybody who wants to push back against that?

Okay.

I mean, just back to Lori's point, at what point do you use all the letters?

Does it start with an instant noise?

Does it make sense?

I mean, that's the only reason why you start hearing things now, right?

You don't live in a big house, so you can't get that much down.

You just need to run all night and spot, you know, the problem with the world.

It's going to crash the moment.

I mean,

It looks like a lot.

I mean, it's hard to see the scale as far as you know, the city boundaries.

It looks like you got a lot of people in the city and then the roads out in the middle.

So I don't know.

I'm.

I'm surprised, like, for example,

This is Rio Road right here.

I don't think, I'm not necessarily concerned about noise, but one of the things I will also mention is that if we're using the full set of the data, everything's going to receive a PAI score or a potential for accessibility improvement score.

And that's okay, but everything's going to be scored.

So that that does make me question like where we're going with this particular pleasure.

And then the other thing is again,

The whole scoring system seems like it favors a paradigm in which we are building up our major roadways to serve all those, but not thinking about is that the best way to serve all of those users.

Like there is another paradigm where you put connection in the bicycle that's not parallel routes and you focus on building those up so that they feel the safest and most comfortable and are available to most users and then you can take a

So the first thing that I'll say is that I think to your first point, we also have to remember, again, that each of these measures is going to be cumulative against other measures.

So I think I don't know this for sure, but I want you to hold that first thought.

Both of you, I want you to hold that first thought while we get into the land use score as well, because that could also add some additional context.

And remember, we're going to be looking at the cumulative impact of all of these.

So this is measuring accessibility to jobs.

whereas the land use is also measuring accessibility to community destinations.

So it could be that some of those concerns are being captured in a different measure.

The second thing to your point is that I do agree with, I do understand that concern.

I think part of that is we could certainly look at how this is weighted, but again, we're trying to identify needs right here, not necessarily develop solutions.

So the solution could be, this isn't defining the solution.

This is saying there's a problem or there's a need potentially that's identified for this area.

And then we can go back and say, what makes sense as far as what solution?

And that could be parallel roads.

That could be trail systems.

That could be something else.

Well, it's going back through.

It's doing this exact same process through for Earliesville Road.

So it's looking at the population.

It's looking at how many more jobs could somebody get to if they could access everything that's currently a level of traffic stress force.

So that could that could have to do with some of the developments up north.

on the northern corridor.

I mean, we can look at this a little bit more, but it's using this exact same methodology for all of those.

It's not based on the number of vehicles.

OK, yeah, you know, part of the thing is, how is that a few that is meaningful?

What do you think is your variables?

Are they return results and sort of make good sense?

I mean, on the basis of what the

I'm just kind of curious.

It's interesting to see what this first cut of the data turns back.

You look at that map and you're like, I'm not trying to pick on an Earley's Bill or Garth Roode or the other yellow line or anybody out there.

It's like, okay, so I'm thinking about my time, what jobs are out by the airport on, you know, what are the Earleys Bill?

and I'm wondering why that, you know, as I do their math, why that pranks to hide a particular one.

It's like any kind of death.

You start looking at it, you start seeing outliers, and you're like, these outliers don't make sense.

It starts making a question because of the whole underlying architecture.

And that's the only way you can have it.

You roll this out for public.

They're going to be like, what the heck?

And you guys have experienced some of that with them all around the city, right?

A little bit, yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think that would just be real.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what I was trying to say.

side here, one of the reasons that land use is being backed and sparked and being paid now is because they had a lot of projects that didn't have land use before.

They wouldn't have gotten in on their congestion or safety scores, and they were solely getting in on land use.

And I think we are looking at it sort of like, you can't have land use without it, solely because of the transportation goals.

I think it can be a factor in it.

I think it's being recognized.

One of the examples of accuracy is sort of the set, you know, the constellation can happen, and get it put out, and stop swimming through the results.

You may think it's all of that, but that's what it can talk about.

So I think we said that it's a factor in a constellation effect.

The other thing that we could potentially look at if we wanted to is to go back and think about this weighting and whether or not we agree with those assumptions.

So the report says that the functional classification is used to scale the weighted average by the volume of trips because they're assuming that basically the higher classified streets are more heavily utilized than lower classified streets.

If we think it's actually the opposite,

And so

You need to get to the end of where you're going to come back and take the part.

Again, really sweet if you guys could provide us one presentation, we could come in, we could go through the thing, see where we're headed with it, and have more time to digest.

I'm just in the spot at the same time.

I'm going to give you an intelligent response.

I don't want to butcher each other.

You can give me an intelligent response.

Text.

Well, I don't want to do it.

Yeah.

Sorry.

I think I'm going to keep delivering on this.

But it's something like 0.9 where it shows up as, for example, pollution is not a high priority.

But it's something where it shows up as a principal material and it's showing up as a high priority.

Here's the solution.

Yeah, so also keep in mind that we're really just talking about non motorized right now we haven't even looked at.

So this is transit access the job that's going to be a little bit smaller because transit doesn't go as far the transit system as an as expenses.

So that's what

Yeah, I don't think so.

This is actually using data that is, what is it, like a pool funded data from the University of Minnesota.

So I'm pretty confident that this is all historic and isn't necessarily considering any recent adjustment.

I don't think that this is factoring in Johnson Commuter Services right here.

Yeah, because again, we're focusing on where the trips are originating, not necessarily whether the trips are ending the destinations.

Yeah.

And then the disadvantaged population access is focusing on, it's doing the same thing, but it's just using transit service because transit service would give the greatest opportunities for improved access to jobs comparatively, I think is the logic there.

This data is considering origin data, but not destination.

It's accessibility to jobs from residential areas.

all of those is Commonwealth Drive.

I think that you know in that triangle, most of which I was powerful drive.

Models this game means long last year.

So all people live there, turned on little jobs in the area.

I guess we'd say they can get to those jobs early.

It's low D's.

They are ultimately close to the jobs and they appeared in them.

Yeah, it would come out low if this means that there aren't necessarily a lot of opportunities to improve the number of jobs they could get access if the conditions improved.

And some of this could also change based on what we set as catchment areas.

So, you know, we can define the catchment areas as well, whether we think that's a 30 minute commute or a 45 minute commute or, you know, we can define that as well.

So how we define those catchment areas could also potentially change what is highlighted as a need.

So we're pretty behind time here.

Are we going to keep going on this?

I don't need to get the tip amendment done, that should be pretty quick.

Do we want to

I think this is, this is a bar.

The other items might not take up that potential for accessibility improvement took a long time to explain.

So I think what I'm hearing is that we want to use the, we want to use like the full, like all the needs for the potential for accessibility improvement for all the measures.

And maybe once we start doing the analysis, we want to consider whether or not we want to keep that functional classification waiting in place.

Is that correct?

Okay.

Any other comments or feedback on that?

Yeah, I think this is based on sort of commonly accepted or commonly assumed catchment areas, but I think we can also, again, maybe do our first pass at this and then, you know, do sort of a gut check.

So the next factor is related to the sort of the managing the roadway capacity or so the congestion and the travel time reliability measure.

So we're doing both a roadway measure using the he's on the travel time index and the planning time index and then we also have a measure related to bus on time performance, which we'll talk about in a second.

The congestion mitigation needs, the recommended measure for these are the travel time index.

So that is basically identified where there is like recurring congestion on roads.

So where is like during the prime commute times, where what is the amount of time, additional time you need to take under congested conditions in order to reach your destination consistently.

So that's measuring the recurrent condition.

And then the travel time reliability is measured with the planning time index, which is basically measuring where are the most severe issues with system reliability.

So if I want to be, they use this 95 percentile travel time, which is basically saying, if I want to be on time for work 95% of the time, how much of a buffer do I need to leave in my ongoing travel planning day?

So the first one is measuring like just general congestion delays.

The second one is measuring system reliability.

So.

The two thresholds that they identified were either using a 1.3 index, meaning that

You know there's a 30% increase either and the amount of time it takes under congested conditions compared to free flow conditions or that there's a 30% you need to leave yourself 30% additional extra time of your overall free flow commute time conditions in order to be at work at 95 95% of the time on time.

or a higher threshold of 1.5.

And again, it's the same question.

The first one is going to say anywhere where there is an identified congestion or a liability concern would get picked up as a need versus the second one saying like only the areas where there are the most significant needs are the ones that we want to consider for receiving a score in this area.

And so these maps, I apologize, these are from VTRANS and I know that they're small and I know that

They're dark, but the green lines right here represent the planning time index, and then the red lines are the congestion areas or the travel time index.

And so this shows the difference between what would be considered a need under that lower 1.3 threshold for both of those factors versus the higher need, which is the 1.5 threshold.

Well, and that also kind of depends on where you're starting and ending.

I think there must be a way to like figure out who you are across that segment, what your average travel time is, and then across that segment, all the time, delay, because it would be probably, no matter where you're coming from, you get the segment, you can get to it at a state of 13, and then you have a fear of going, you can deal with a little bit of rejection.

In this community, you can deal with a little bit of rejection, favor, and politically be even though it's well-authenticated,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe with those two together, the bus on-time performance might catch some of these areas where the buses are actually impacted by their roadway conditions.

So the higher threshold for that one.

So this is measuring the on-time.

So the next one we'll talk about is the bus on-time performance.

So this is really just measuring what, how well buses are performing with their on-time performance and that's being considered, they're considered on time if they arrive no more than 30 seconds early and no more than five minutes late to major stops.

So there are certain stops that have time points associated with them.

We're measuring bus on-time performance based on where those time points are on the scheduled routes.

So there were two thresholds that were developed for this one.

And again, I want to be really clear when I say this, that we're not using this to sort of make any inferences about the transit system operations or anything like that, but really to identify where there are system improvements, to your point, Michael, that are needed to help facilitate bus on time performance.

So the two thresholds that were used or were suggested are either stops for the on-time performance for the best system at those

route at the designated stops are less than the system average for the on-time performance from the previous year or stops where the on-time performance is lower than the established transit performance goal.

And I think talking to the transit agency, it might make sense to focus more on the system average because that would

Help us understand where the system or where the transportation system or the bus system has the most opportunity to improve their performance based on Like that would focus on probably their most critical needs.

So every bus that you see sitting in front of the back of the center

And I'm sorry, we were showing up early and that's an error.

They're showing up, so downtown

is measuring whether they're on time based on the departure.

It's saying, pick up the stock and then serve it.

Instead of saying left, it's stop on time.

It's saying back to the stock and serve it.

So it's not going to happen.

So every time you pull that down, things are up.

I'm sure there's a debate about the same church involved to stop holding the direction.

Get in there and look out for the guy to get out of the boat.

Any questions or concerns with that?

This is the congestion map at the low threshold.

So right here, it's just measuring.

It looks like late, not early.

And how does this usually look?

Clearly I'm on my side where you guys are a week ago with the beginning of the transportation plan, but obviously that's, how do you pick up that when there's some of the streets that will be adding work with the local finance, things like that.

That's in the department, they have a work review plan, right?

Wait, there's a transvision plan, a transvision plan, right?

Yeah.

This devastates coming from

was observable now from a system that's smaller than what you hope to be in the next 10 years from now.

At least certainly the time frame is planned.

Well, again, I think this is just looking at the system performance where the opportunities are for improvement, where the highest critical needs are based on what we're observing now.

But then I also think that

that some of these observations are talking about are things that we could also capture partially in the model if we think there are going to be capacity improvements in the regional transportation model.

I don't know that that is even going to would accurately be captured in the modeling process itself.

I think the impacts from the transit improvements are really challenging to sort of capture.

So I think part of this is just working to

use our best professional judgment as we're implementing the solutions to assess what can we do and what do we think is going to have the most value for the community.

I think so, yeah.

I mean, there are advancements in the travel modeling that's happening to you.

So maybe someday those could provide more like accuracy when it comes to integrating the improvements that could be anticipated from transit operations.

All right, so the next set of measures that we're looking at is this access to non-work destinations.

So this is really capturing the land use considerations.

So before we were looking at access, improving access to jobs, and Jessica, you're just in time.

So now we're talking about how do we improve access to non-work destinations, and this is using a set of

As that data from V-Trans referred to as there's a walk score, there's a bike score, there's a transit score.

So all of these are sort of measuring what is the opportunity to improve the opportunity, what is the opportunity to improve access to all of these community destinations that aren't necessarily primarily considered jobs.

So it includes things like I think it includes schools,

libraries, parks, grocery stores, places like that, like those kinds of community destinations where obviously people work as well, but have value to the community outside of the job centers.

And then it's also based on analyzing the overall intersection density.

So to find where there are opportunities basically for

really non-motorized transportation alternatives that would improve the connectivity of these denser land use areas.

So there were two thresholds that were recommended for this one as well.

First of all, is that we could focus on areas where there are higher land use or these higher walk scores or transit scores that are in the defined growth areas.

So this would basically be focusing on the total area of the city of Charlottesville and then the identified growth areas in Albemarle County.

So focusing on any opportunity where there's a high, the other thing I should explain to this, because this is a little bit counterintuitive, is that locations where there is a higher walk score, which means that there's a higher network density, which means that there's a higher number of these community destinations that would be accessible, will score better.

That's a little bit counterintuitive, but the idea is that those will be opportunities where

it would just increase accessibility where there might be like network gaps that could be filled that would improve the opportunity to better connect, better connect land uses within these areas.

So the first one would focus on the development areas.

And then the second segment would define basically anything that had a somewhat walkable census tract.

So there's a walk score that's 50, 50 or greater in any areas within the MPO.

And so again, the effect of affecting the first threshold is that needs will be considered for all of the growth areas, regardless of the current walk score.

So everything would be scored if it's within one of the growth areas.

And then the result of the second one is that basically the walk scores would be higher in the more urban areas, even though the entire the entire MPA region would potentially be eligible to receive a score.

And then this is also measured by the total population unemployment in the TAZ.

So there is some consideration to your point, Michael, for the future growth projections for each of these areas.

So if you have a population that maybe doesn't have as high of a base population now, but you're anticipating it's going to grow significantly, that would get a little bit more of a higher weighting and the prioritization of that.

So this is where you see some of those opportunities in that northern section of 29.

No, but this is all based on V-Trans data.

The reason I ask that is because sometimes I've seen V-Trans, it's a blank

So I don't know how that works in the system, but hopefully I understand what it seems to be.

Walks were obviously that comes from that measure that tries to show how walkability various sentence tracks are.

It's within the walkability area.

So it's just basically saying how walkable it is.

And then there's, and then it's weighted.

This is recommending that there's a weighting by the population.

So in other words, the higher figures here are areas that are relatively a lot of people that have a relatively reasonable capacity to walk.

I think we use the walk score because that was that that seemed to capture sort of this land use coordination factor most comprehensively because they also develop through V-trans, they also develop a bike score and a transit score, but we focused on the walk score.

It's where the walking is good, but where the walk is good and there's opportunities for... So this kind of gets at this question.

Almost the walk score and the potential for accessibility improvement are almost measuring like two different sides of the accessibility argument.

So the potential for accessibility improvement is saying, we want to expand the breadth of where people can go.

So it's kind of, correct, correct.

It seems a little weird to phrase it as we have a walking knee, it's where all the walking knees do.

Like seeing this mat and saying, this is where our knees are, it's where the right elbow is.

Yeah.

I was just curious, like that Pantops, the far right.

Yeah.

There are a lot of restaurants, businesses, medical, like community facilities that people would need to access.

what what there isn't necessarily good in pancakes is maybe the facilities consistent facilities throughout the area, so this is saying like these are opportunities where there's already where there's like a really good opportunity to connect these things.

But again, context matters.

So why is this street wagons on one side, or the food line in the city on the other side?

That doesn't seem to show up.

I mean, of course, scale here.

But I don't think it doesn't seem to show up on this thing.

But that might be shown by the accessibility measure, correct?

I'm going to hop in my soapbox for a second.

I'm very happy to see how they're moving in their conference plan to identify senators.

You know, areas that are in, I think, all the oscillations, they identify two main senators in the board, two in the board, or two dispersed, and they were having a hard time creating the conversation.

The city, I mean, even I don't believe it's legal.

you know, there's certainly certain areas in the city that are trying to get to walk through the first sentence, trying to get to the sentence.

I'm not quite sure, maybe that would be a local way, but I don't want to be trained up again.

Actually, I'll go back and investigate my own sister agency's creation of the means there.

I wonder if we could use a different polygon as a different proxy that would be closer to

the areas of the county and the city identified as these are the areas of the need of our private public.

Yeah, I'm using, so I just want to clarify because maybe this is a place where we're getting a little hung up.

This is not actually using the defined V-trans activity centers in this analysis.

This is using a walk score that is developed by like a third party agency that is being fed into this.

So I'm using an activity center, not necessarily as the same way V-trans would use it, but basically saying as like

like places that would generate a location of interest for people to travel to.

And if you go to B-Trans and you look at the walk score data, it will tell you what like factors it considers when developing the walk scores.

So what are we seeing as methods outside of the mill here?

Well, this is the development area, so you won't see anything else.

Yeah, I mean, within the MPA around the development area, it would be getting some IV stuff that was developed for development areas, maybe like

No, but it would be anywhere where there's a walk score that's greater than 50.

So basically saying that 50 is sort of the cutoff or where we think that there might be some good intersection density and enough locations of interest that maybe could constitute being scored for this walk score.

Well, this is just the development areas.

Yeah.

Actually, some places in the development areas are just some of your non working destinations.

So I will say that we're still working with the consultants to actually be able to run the analysis, so I don't have the raw data for this.

And then, you know, in the AAC 44 process, they're talking about kind of a renewed priority on these crossroads communities, which may be like early spills in BMPO that like might also have value for kind of local areas that are in the rural area, but sort of, you know, it's a lot of really useful services.

County, do you have any thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, in terms of this specific question that you're asking us right now, I agree that we should go with a lesser definition.

Okay.

it really doesn't make intuitive sense to me based on what I'm talking about.

And you guys are just coming back to the good ones, like drywall, especially drywall west of the J.D.

Just broadly concerned, I think, that the process is very

Independents to see the data that I'm looking forward to seeing how they all connect and what that means because independently I'm not seeing it being 6.

Sure.

Which is kind of why you thought, and you hear what Roy had said about that.

To me, the development area is in a very, very limited room.

But obviously, to be private, this is a private window out, and that place will highlight these areas and leave others

and part of the Albemarle High School is not a show-up event.

It's not close to, it may be a designation, but you may deal with it manually, or managing it by saying we need to connect that with a feature, but we've seen the correspondence in respects to areas, you know, I see BRIO and the hydraulic kind of area and what's going on, and shame on us, but we call it an area

it shows up in the celebratory sense.

It doesn't show this.

Which is not, you know, it's kind of hard to tell after this.

You know.

The issues in 19.

Looking firstly, it's not hard to see the color scale.

Yeah.

Right.

And then we get into this

is a very finite area and we do a big data set.

I don't think you can see where you're going with that.

I'm probably not.

I think you're going to have to get a copy of the quality of it.

I think the other part of this is citizen garbage.

I mean, the data set we have for that is not a big delight to be and who knows what's being

Yeah.

And I just want to reassure you all that, again, I certainly understand that there's limitations with the data.

We are required to do a data-driven performance process.

So this is a first step towards doing that.

It gives us pieces of information.

And there's going to be an opportunity for us to review this, to say this is what the data is not picking up that I know is a need.

Maybe some of that is captured in the community feedback as well.

So hopefully, you know.

there are probably at least three prongs to sort of identify the needs and this is one of them.

Any other comments on that?

I think that gets through the bulk of it.

So this is a good place to sort of wrap up this conversation for right now.

Yeah, is it possible to be in Wayne?

Yeah, I mean, all the information should be in the report that was sent out.

I can send out the PowerPoint.

Like I said, we're still working with the consultants to actually be able to process the information, be able to run the analysis.

I don't have any raw numbers I can share.

So yes, correct.

Yeah, either just sample.

So like, but you know, put like, what am I missing?

Everybody?

No.

Yeah, I mean, we need to verify the data sources that were used.

We need to those were like thresholds that like these were just intended to sort of be examples of what the outputs would look like.

OK.

Yeah, so the TIP amendment is really just that the Virginia passenger rail authority determined that they were able to use money through the congestion mitigation and air quality program to not go where I thought it was going to go.

to support new state services for Amtrak.

So they would like to program a portion of CMAQ funding to the Charlottesville, Albemarle area to cover a portion of the expenses for row and overall 46 that would be going through the Charlottesville, Albemarle region using CMAQ funding.

So this does require a TIP amendment because it is in the amount of

$9 million, a little over $9 million.

But basically, it's new CMAQ funding for that particular service.

Gee, what do you want to say?

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any opposition?

Same.

Alright, that was quick.

No, we can have just a really quick conversation on SmartScale.

Mostly, there are just a couple of things that I wanted to show you all.

So, based on the proposed change to how the LAMJEE score was applied, what I did was I went through and looked at all of the Round 5 scores.

in the MPO area that were submitted in around five, and this shows sort of what the impacts on the scoring outcomes would be.

As Michael had mentioned earlier, Avon Street, the Avon Street multimodal improvement project was one that got a vast majority.

of its score from the land use score, I think it had a total benefit score of 13.4 and 12.6 of those points came from the land use score.

So when you make the adjustment to convert the land use from a standalone score to a multiplier, this just shows what the outcomes are.

Now, overall, the expectation is that the project scores would be lower in general.

And so it's not necessarily a major concern that some of these are experiencing small

small decreases in the project score because remember SmartScale brings projects against other projects.

But you can see that in some cases that would significantly impact the likelihood that those projects, those types of projects would be funded.

So I just wanted to provide a little bit of additional context for that.

And then the other thing that I did was I went back and looked at all of the projects that were submitted within our region through on rounds one through five.

and pulled out the projects that the MPO would be eligible to submit based on the changes to the high priority program definition that is being proposed.

So this, what I will say that is good for our region is that the MPO is submitting the right types of projects by and large, like these were the projects that appear to meet that definition.

I wasn't 100% sure on these two projects at the bottom.

Exit 118 was sort of entered into SmartScale as a safety improvement to correct some weaving patterns that had impacts on the interchange but wasn't necessarily indicated as an interchange improvement project.

So I'm not sure if that one would meet that definition.

And then I think we're still unsure on whether or not the Ravenna River Bicycle and Pedestrian Crossing would be considered a new capacity highway project or not.

I know that one's a little bit of an outlier.

County, TJPDC, and the MPO submitted.

So these were the list of projects that we would have continued to have been able to submit under that.

So just wanted to provide a little bit of additional context as part of that discussion and give you all an opportunity, if there's any other feedback you want to share,

I will just say.

It won't call you.

We have a district planner talk about adding regional trails to this way.

I'm proud of her for that.

That doesn't work with definition, but that doesn't seem to be.

showed it to that, and to the projects that could be submitted by like India.

Right, but the number, based on what I was understanding, the locality is still on the project, right?

But I think the intent here is to try and focus on the systemic issues that are

I think that's why I interpreted the biggest part of our community is not being able to fund a multi-million project through their MPI.

but maybe you have a regional pipeline based on that.

I don't know if it has, I don't know, they're just funding things like a three-hour trail exclusively or in a town in the United States that we would build right now.

We're talking about some of this more between jurisdictions and commuter pack.

No, not that I'm aware.

They aren't talking about this in August.

I think they're next expected to bring this up again in September.

I think some of the things I might have heard, and again, Michael, if you've heard anything from your side of things, certainly feel free to jump in.

I think one of the things isn't necessarily

It might not necessarily be about like not awarding projects based on past performance, but maybe reconsidering the request to administer for past performance.

Well, that's a problem, regardless of who we are.

We're trying to move on.

It's a long time we've been into the big projects.

Yeah.

That made the fact that it was something that was not considered in Sparksville to be in this country.

Can we get those slides?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and then we're gonna need more jurisdictions to those in future.

Probably good for you guys.

I'm trying to be out of that.

Mm hmm.

Let's say

I mean, you all were working on the same forest plan, right?

So, there were different levels.

They made it to the worse level and moved it way back up.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I guess the last thing we're going to say.

Yeah, and it's all about if VDOT does everything you see, projects, how does that occur, lots of potential opportunities, topics, different styles.

If VDOT turns over to new projects, well, that enables us to figure out if that's where it happens.

We have our own standards in terms of we really need more sense of VDOT in that situation as well as that in which we have

I mean, it wasn't free, but the stuff is obviously going to be fine.

Yeah, go back to that, you know, taking the land use factor out of the way.

It seemed to really degrade a lot of our projects in the previous round.

Do you sense there anything that would speed why, you know,

So, I mean, that seems to like maybe

But it's not very much.

Yeah, so the other thing that I've heard a lot of people talking about is really how safety is measured.

So, for example, I'll use a different project because I just know this off the top of my head, but for the Ravenna River Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge, it actually didn't get any points for safety improvements because there's not a facility currently there that

So there's no facility currently there that showing change or showing problems so the free bridge is not

Oh gosh I mean it's pretty similar to what we're talking about with the long-range transportation plan where there's like a basis on a crash engine history or a potential for safety improvement or something like that so if there's an incidence or if there's an area where you can measure that there's some sort of like negative impact that the project would resolve

you would get a score for that.

I don't know the specific measures.

Yeah.

And again, I guess, you know, to be fair, you know, they're doing this for, they have to develop a system that is going to be applied for almost 400 projects throughout the state every year.

But I think to your point, Rory, that there are benefits that probably feel intuitive to us that aren't being captured.

And, you know, clearly, I think it's clear to me that these are like Avon,

have a very more widely used for transportation, probably even than a British hand box.

But because we happen to have a trailer by, that happens to score well.

So it sounds like what you're saying is that land use maybe is a proxy for measuring some of the latent demand or the latent aid.

but certainly in the 80s and 90s and back to the 80s and going back to existing developments going on.

When you get to the work of a project that is a site plan under construction, we'll get rid of the construction, but you do want to spend, you know, you almost have to time it.

Oh yeah, you know, we got some big data, so this is what we're going to put our next.

Yeah, in this area, you know, we have similar to all the downtown law, you know, the property, the private, someplace close to the downtown law, you get a lot of facilities.

Yeah, they have a little bit of commercial in it.

They have a lot of residential, you know, they have a little bit of commercial in it.

There's a lot of these really good rules that sort of don't seem just going to come back to the development area, the boundary concept.

It's kind of unique, particularly for everybody else in the state to have a development boundary.

Prince William has the urban and rural area.

It should be more about the density of what's there than, oh, there

But

All right, I think that's probably, if you all have any other thoughts, you're welcome to email me this afternoon as well.

But it is 11.59.

All right.

Yes.

We have a motion.

Sorry, there's a correction.

Okay, so one correction, RFP with a motion to approve.

Is that, do you have a second?

I have a second.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any exceptions?

Okay, great.

I'll make it quick because I know everyone wants to probably get to lunch but I will send our agency update.

Just noted that we had our post-award webinar last Friday.

The recording and the presentations are available on the website.

and then we are also going to be rolling out our new assignments for MPOs.

So Daniel Wagner has been sitting on this call patiently listening to the discussion, but he will be assuming as your main point of contact.

But as always, if there are any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me or anyone else.

Great, thanks.

All right, anything else for anyone?

Do I have a motion to adjourn?

All in favour?

Aye, passed unanimously.