MPO Technical Committee Meeting   4/15/2025

I'm sure we're happy to.

Ben Chambers, present.

Kelly Brown.

Rory Stolzenberg.

Jessica Hersh-Ballering.

I agree.

Lonnie Murray?

Here.

I'm online.

I'm here.

Sure.

Sandy Shackelford.

Christine Jacobs.

Sarah Simba.

Bill Palmer?

Here.

Midge Huber?

Here.

Wood Hudson?

Sarah Pennington?

Yes.

Garland Williams?

All right, that's it.

OK, we can all vote to allow Chuck to participate virtually.

All right, and a second.

Second.

Thank you.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right, welcome to the club, Chuck.

Thanks a lot.

I don't think we have any folks public here today.

So we will move along to review and acceptance of the agenda.

Can I get a motion to accept the agenda?

So moved.

Second from Albert.

Thank you.

Any opposed?

Hearing none, this will be our agenda.

Next, we're going to approve our meeting minutes from the last meeting.

If anyone's had a chance to review those minutes and have any changes, let us know.

If not, I'll take a motion to accept the meeting minutes from February 18th.

So moved.

Any second?

Second.

Thank you.

Any opposed?

Hearing none, we will move along to new business and I'll pass it along to

Taylor Jenkins, Director of Transportation for the PDC.

I'm here today just to bring the UPWP back to you with minor revisions, and we are looking for a recommendation to the Policy Board to adopt for this item today.

So just as a reminder, the UPWP is basically the MPO's work plan for the next fiscal year.

It identifies all of the transportation planning activities that staff can work on, and it includes any major regional priorities and deliverables.

Changes since the first time that you all have seen this draft.

We received updated PL funding allocations from VDOT that include our fiscal year 24 passive rollover funds.

That increase to those funds were split proportionally across all three of the tasks.

Unfortunately, we haven't received the final VDOT SPR allocations yet, but those will not impact the MPO's work plan.

That is merely VDOT's budget for the work that they will do with the MPO.

We also haven't received FTA allocations from DRPT yet, so that those will still be represented as last year's numbers until we receive those.

Here is the fiscal year 26 work program funding by source similar to last time with just that additional increase of about $5,000 to account for in here.

Everything in red is still just a placeholder from last year until we hear on those updated funding amounts that I spoke about.

For funding by task, just a reminder for administration, approximately 25% of the funds.

For long-range transportation planning, 30% of the budget.

And for short-range transportation planning, 45% of the budget.

For program administration, there are no major changes to this allocation.

So this covers things such as staffing committees, public outreach, information sharing, and professional development.

and any compliance with regulations or reporting requirements.

For task two, long-range transportation planning, there was a change in the line items captured under this task.

So the three-notch trail coordination is a new sub-task that was added just to capture the three-notch trail master planning process that just kicked off recently.

But otherwise, you've got the same sub-task that you all saw in the previous draft with the comprehensive safety action plan, the transportation demand model update that is currently ongoing,

the travel demand management study, and any updates to our long-range transportation plan as necessary.

For short-range transportation planning, all of these subtasks are still the same that you saw with the initial draft, with the only change being that we will have an update to our transportation improvement program, and the staff will also participate in the state's process as they update the staff as well next fiscal year.

And next steps in the approval timeline.

So as I mentioned at the beginning, we are looking for a recommendation to the NPO Policy Board to adopt the UPWP with amendments to the budget once we get those updated numbers.

This has been posted for public notice on our website, and it will also be posted in the newspaper to collect any comments from the public.

I guess my question is,

Yeah, we have recognized that we are a bit out of order with

CTAC should ideally see things first and then it followed through to the NPO technical committee and then the NPO policy board.

Since they are off cycle, we don't want that to be a reason why they don't see anything at all.

And so we still have been taking everything to them to give them the opportunity to weigh in.

They have already seen the draft and they had a couple of minor questions so far, but nothing major has come up to them.

We've also talked internally, I know I spoke to you about the cadence of the MPO tech meetings.

I know a lot of you know this because you're interested.

It falls at the same time as the CTV meetings.

So we have talked about do we need to find a better date and time so that we can participate in the CTV meetings live versus after the fact?

And then we've also talked internally about should we be moving those C tech meetings to align with the same month as MPO tech and policy boards so that it's not off by that one month?

those conversations just happened in the last two weeks so we didn't haven't brought like a tentative change in schedule yet but we will be bringing that to you guys in the future to see if there's a better date and time that doesn't throw everybody's schedule off that can make all of these things happen in a better order.

So your next steps right now are that we vote to recommend this policy board.

Correct with that.

Yeah.

All right.

So all in favor of recommending a new feedback to the MPO Policy Board, say aye.

Aye.

And any against, say no.

Any abstentions?

All right.

You have your recommendation.

All right.

Awesome.

Welcome.

Thank you very much for the invitation to come and address this body today.

It's a real privilege to be here and I'm excited to be here.

Today we are going to talk about a very unique opportunity for a safe street for all grant and I provided a PowerPoint which you should have and then hopefully it's been distributed to you.

I will warn you there's a lot of information on there and I did that intentionally so you can look back at it after this presentation should you have any questions.

So a quick overview and I walk around a lot so I'll try not to trip.

There's a lot of words on here.

Don't worry about many of them at the moment, except this line that I want to highlight on this slide at the moment, which is the grant applications for up to $4.62 million.

And the 20% match is going to be provided by Honda and UVA.

And I'm going to talk about how that played out moving forward.

So what you see here

It's kind of a bubble map of everybody that we've got involved so far.

This is a big effort, and I'm going to talk about what that looks like moving forward.

But we really wanted to do our due diligence early and make sure we had a very strong team of consistent and involved stakeholders.

And thank you for those in this room who are part of those conversations to bring us to this point.

And if it weren't you, it was your coworkers who helped to bring us.

But we feel like we have a very strong team moving forward.

So what are we moving forward towards?

What problem are we trying to solve?

If you look at these statistics here, you probably know them better than I do.

They're very sad, they're very sobering, and they're very stark.

Vulnerable road users are in danger, and we all know that.

We know that here in Central Virginia, and since COVID, those numbers have certainly risen, unfortunately.

I want to highlight a couple things down here.

First off, and I noticed there, I don't think there are public members here today, but

They expect every road project we do will accommodate all forms of mobility, whether it's an existing road or a proposed road or one we're building.

This is an assumption that's just kind of out there that we need to deal with in this body's front and foremost in that effort.

Secondly, if you read the bottom, there's an industry challenge with risk-based safety design due to minimal VRU price data and limited understanding of VRU behaviors based on infrastructure characteristics.

and interactions with vehicular traffic.

I know that's a long sentence, there's a lot in there, but this is really what's missing in the research area and the creation of standards, is the connection of behaviors with what people do with virtual situations and the geometry that's out there.

So how did we get here?

This started with Honda.

Honda approached UVA, and we have a good relationship with them, with some of our labs, and they saw an opportunity

because they have their internal goals of reducing VRU incidents regarding injuries and deaths involving Honda vehicles.

But they realize it's bigger than that.

This is a problem that requires a bigger thinking and bigger solutions.

So they saw an opportunity with UVA, especially with VDOT, the third largest DOT in America, and approached us.

We kind of locked the doors in UVA and did a lot of brainstorming.

How do we approach this in maybe a new way?

a new way to create new results that are meaningful.

Then we went to VDOT, we connected with PAMPO, and we're here today.

So the objectives, I know it's a really bad form to read slide, but I'm going to do that because I think this is important.

The first objective is to improve VRU safety, reduce accidents, reduce injury-associated mobility, and cost and save lives.

That is a very noble role.

One of the reasons why you're here, one of the reasons why I'm an engineer,

We're here to save lives.

But there are other objectives as well.

Improve understanding of ERU interactions with traffic and infrastructure.

Provide holistic safety picture to better evaluate realized safety benefits and risks in infrastructure design.

And I'm going to talk about those in a few minutes.

And also develop models to advance automotive crash avoidance systems to further protect ERUs.

So this is the EVA team.

And I want to point out a couple things with this slide.

First of all, don't think of these as silos.

Think of these like different areas of concentration, different labs, different groups of people, different areas of focus and specialties.

We are bringing together a very unique coalition within UVA to help for this product.

Very unique.

It is not common for there to be this cross-pollination of labs and investment from the thought leaders.

And that's the second point.

If you look at these pictures here,

These are not first-year grad students.

These are the thought leaders in the industries.

Hopefully you know some of them and they're going to be involved in leading this project.

So this is our approach methodology.

A lot of work on this slide.

For later, please don't try and read them all right now.

I'm going to walk you through this.

So this is generally what we're going to do.

First, data collection.

There's a lot of data out there, traffic data that you all know about.

There's also a lot of data that is missing when it comes to VRUs.

because we don't have near miss data.

It's just, it's not as prevalent as it is with vehicular traffic.

This is where the OM, the Omni-Reality Cognition Lab is going to come into play.

Donna and Arsalan, hopefully you met them, if you haven't, they're wonderful people.

They're going to continue working down their line of thought, which is creating ways to generate data that isn't there, which is really cool.

So, and it's new data.

So they use virtual reality, they put all kinds of sensors on people that they get to go out and do things, and they're able to determine

data that isn't there and create data, which is really cool.

So we're going to collect a lot of data, then they're going to augment that with virtual reality.

Why they're going to do that is there are some situations that just don't occur very often, in large part because they're unsafe.

People do it, and we don't have a lot of data on your misses.

So they can create data in situations where we don't have data.

Then we're going to analyze the data, and this is where it gets really cool.

They're going to create a trajectory model, which means any of you, you, you, you,

If you're using a VRU unit, if you're a scooter or a biker, you may act differently than the people you're sitting next to, especially given the environmental conditions you're under, the road geometry and such.

They're going to create ways, a model that will predict what your individual trajectory paths will be with the distribution curve, which is super cool.

What really gets interesting is what this next step is, where we pair up with PAP, which is one of the world's leading labs as far as injury causation.

We're going to create an injury consequence model.

So if I choose course A, this will be my likely injury.

If I choose course B, this will be my likely injury.

If I choose course C, this will be my likely injury.

We compare that trajectory distribution path and curve with what the injuries would be.

Why that's important.

If the shoulder is this wide, will they get injured?

If it's this wide or this wide, will they die?

Those are information that we don't have right now.

We do a lot of gut checks, a lot of intuition in design,

A lot of rules of thumb, which I'll talk about in a minute.

This is going to provide some new information.

We're going to combine those two and then over here come up with some new insights.

And right down here, if you can read this with me, create better holistic understanding of your safety and effective mitigation designs.

This is the big goal.

The big goal.

Nobody is doing this.

What I mean by that is it's a holistic approach.

And if you think back to the slide with the different UVA categories of people,

Right now, research is done in this area, and then in this area, and then in this area.

And very few people, nobody, is taking a step back and seeing how they all work together.

And that's what we're trying to do here.

So our primary deliverables, first and foremost, help CAMPA.

We want real results from this.

Real results are tangible and meaningful to the people who live here.

So we want to enhance CAMPA's comprehensive action plan with data-driven VRU action plan, focused on safety and accessibility,

County can leverage this data, and I would strongly encourage you do.

Now the localities as well.

Performance based design.

I don't know how familiar you are with that, but that is a new AASHTO directive of how to design roads.

Not blindly adhere to the book of standards, which we all know and love as engineers.

You're right.

performance-based design, context-sensitive solution, those by a lot of names, making risk-based decisions based on the context they need situation.

This effort is going to tremendously help that.

We're also going to be able to look at high-risk situations.

And what I mean by that, think of an urban work zone and a busy intersection with skewed roads coming in and out.

There is no standard for that, right?

We all know that as engineers, there aren't standards for that.

So use your best judgment.

This is going to help with that.

And lastly, kind of a tangential benefit, but a really neat one.

I'm just going to take this information back, integrate it into their case scenarios, and help advance their collision avoidance within their vehicles and other manufacturers as well as well.

This is an effort that's going to produce some real benefits for people.

So path forward, hopefully I'm on time.

This is the first of this kind of gauntlet of meetings, but you guys know the procedures well or better than I do.

We spent a lot of time kind of getting to the launch pad here and this is the formality to go through and actually launch and the goal of course is to submit the application by the deadline in late June.

And are there any questions?

My question probably won't be surprising, I'm sorry.

So as a runner myself, just looking real quickly, I've logged 2016 miles on the road.

Um, you know, I think, you know, there's a huge population of runners, cyclists and walkers.

Um, many of them have associated clubs and organizations that are associated with them.

We also have a well-known, um, business in Albemarle County, um, sorry, city of Charlottesville bragging about running shop.

There's other businesses associated with catered people.

What are we doing to reach out to those people?

Because I feel like there's qualitative information about, um, dangerous places.

That's a great point, and we will certainly be working closely with Campo to do exactly that.

They will be the determining threshold as far as the level and degree of citizen involvement, but I think that's a tremendous group point, and I'm sure you would appreciate, and I use cyclists as an example.

We see this from Richmond when I was at the VDOT for many years, and Northern Virginia where

We build bike paths and avid cyclists never use them because it's dangerous to that because you have little strollers and people walking and such.

So when you look at VRUs, you almost have to think about it in terms of there is no one solution because there are different kinds of VRUs, even if they're using the same kind of vehicular mobility.

So kind of a long answer, I apologize for that, but for cyclists, for instance,

An avid cyclist does ride differently than a college student who's got earbuds.

So they need to think about those things.

And that's one of the reasons why, when you go back to what Donna and Arsel are doing with the OMCR, the Omni Reality and Cognition Lab, they're able to see this kind of user would likely do this in this scenario, which is really important.

I would also encourage you to use the Strava data, which includes all the Garmin data from devices like this.

They're widely used by runners like this.

And while the absence of Strava data doesn't mean that no one walks or runs there, but the presence of it definitely means that people walking like this.

Yes, thank you.

So I guess you kind of articulated, I'm looking for examples in my head, like how are we going to use this moving forward, right?

So you talked a little bit about like, you know, what's going to happen if the shoulders X amount of feet or, you know, or wider or narrow or what have you.

But, you know, and you expressed like,

All these standards we have that make it very difficult to still make these complicated

intersections that have organically developed over time to fit these standards, especially in older communities that are, we're not Florida where we're building from new, right?

So like thinking of the VDOT study, I'm assuming we're going to hear from after you, looking at Ridge, McIntyre, West Main, Water, South, all that coming together, like how would we

use this model for like engineering that intersection?

Great question.

So and there may be a multi-pronged answer.

Big picture, I think this grant will provide a lot of opportunity to help them craft their safety plan moving forward.

And my understanding is their current grant for that is running out so time may work very well just to tell this in and carry on.

So that's the first way it's going to directly help this area.

And that can take a bunch of different forms, you know, one of which may be kind of reevaluating or rethinking, or I'll say further clarifying decision criteria and considerations of how projects are chosen and what the solutions may be in projects, which can be a great benefit for people.

Additionally, it can be a tremendous benefit when you're talking to the citizens, especially the advocates, which are usually very involved.

to let them know, and I'll make it on a slight tangent here, information creates power which creates trust.

So in an organization like this, if you're doing leading research and you're communicating to cyclist groups, we are trying to make this safer for you and we are trying to lead the industry in this.

That builds trust with this organization that I think could resonate in a lot of different ways long term, that's number one.

Number two, I think the specific models and such,

Would it like, I mean, would VDOT be able to kind of say like, all right, well, if we put a roundabout at this intersection, X is going to happen versus if we don't put a roundabout at this intersection, Y is going to happen.

For qualitative, you know, when you have these conversations with users, like, I mean, I can tell you one of the dangerous things I see all the time is we've had like a walk signal and a right turn next to one another because people are

people making the right turn are not looking at the people across the yellowed out signal.

So talking to pedestrians, they say like, hey, this is the thing I encounter all the time.

I've been almost hit several times in this situation.

And then maybe go back and looking, is there data to support that?

I'm very involved with ASHA.

I can tell you that's a common problem across America with these types of traffic engineers.

And, you know, VRUs,

Let's be candid, there is no 100% safe way to mix vulnerable road users with pedestrian traffic, especially in certain situations.

There isn't, but I think we can make it safer and we can identify those areas where we can make the biggest impact.

Yes.

Are any standards and other, I guess, rules that come out of this, are they expected to be adopted by the stakeholders in the region in VDOT?

Or is it kind of like, here are the things we could do and then

I think that depends on the entity.

This will be a Campo effort, so they will take the results and run with them because it will be something they're doing and overseeing and want to do to help that.

Other stakeholders, such as Charlottesville and Albemarle, I think will be encouraged to leverage that data, but

your own entities you can kind of do what you want to do as we know in certain areas and be that kind of the same way so yes and no okay it won't be a requirement at the end that anybody adopt any of the recommendations they'll just be presented I guess I have not actually read through the scope but my question is sort of the scale of your existing conditions collection like are we looking at specific locations are we looking at sort of

Broad network of the urbanized area, where are we looking?

We will look at specific locations which will be determined and strategically determined to try and give a spatter of

So you're probably pulling from our existing plan, which is locating different areas where we need to have some focus.

So maybe there's opportunities there.

And I would add to that, we will certainly be working hand in hand with Campos.

And also as a part of, you know, if we were to move forward with this application, the EJPDC as staffing the MPO would be the lead applicant.

And so we have also written into our own scope in order to administer this grant, we would be bringing it back to our existing committees intermittently to make sure that we're getting feedback from CTAC, from MPO Tech, and from the policy board on this study.

So this isn't going to happen in isolation.

This is going to be a part of what comes to you all regularly.

So you can also

I hope you don't exclude rural areas.

I hope you find some rural areas, because we have unique challenges in rural areas, because we don't have funding for things like sidewalks and bike lanes, which creates a lot of transportation challenges for pedestrians.

And there are people that

Just because we live in a rural area doesn't mean that we need to walk those things.

My daughters will bike to their friend's house.

There are people in my neighborhood that walk down.

This is a teenager in my neighborhood who walks several miles to go to the church.

So I think those are potentially vulnerable road users and yet they don't have sidewalks or bike lanes.

And there are decisions made by VDOT about things like road paving that

Yes, very good point.

Especially bus stops.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A couple of questions.

You mentioned briefly that Honda agreed to kind of share this data.

Is that something they've already committed to?

Because usually a lot of partnerships, one of the catches is that it's proprietary.

Great question.

Every discussion I've been in has not been right at all, and very intentionally, because they are hoping that this, I mean, honestly, it's a very low investment for them, given their research dollars, and maybe this is an opportunity, I think I'm correct in saying, to forward the industry knowledge envelope.

will benefit Honda, but it will also benefit everybody.

And I really do get the sense that there is some altruistic point of perspective from them that this is very little seed money, we're going to benefit everybody and it's going to save lives.

And so let's just do it.

And they came to the UVA and hoping to get it in Virginia because of honestly the reputation of UVA and the reputation of VDOT.

And so, I mean, VDOT does its third largest DOT.

and the reason that's important is because if there's a change that the data embraces, it can be widespread implemented much after the most other states.

So, I don't believe it's a weak criteria in any way.

Another question, Sawyer.

I guess as I'm understanding it, you know, looking at the, you know, vulnerable road user experience through some sort of technology and mapping that somehow, and then you're

You know, how are you guys just looking at VDOT standards, AASHTO standards?

Are you looking across the board?

That's a good question.

And being an engineer, that's a hard question to answer because performance based design comes right to the heart of that.

where there may be design sections or design waivers that are applicable and appropriate in certain situations and the right thing to do in certain situations.

And the way performance based design is written at AASHTO, the way it's been interpreted and implemented.

Decisions are made pending the level of dollars spent at the project and such at the district level or at the central office.

That's how things change.

So there will still be options to design and construct things that are associated, given the appropriate approvals.

Where this product is kind of headed, we've also, you may remember on the focus screen, you saw the EPRC import.

We wanted to make sure they were involved and they will be involved in some of the review processes.

So they're probably going to look at things through VDOT and AASHTO lenses.

I think AASHTO is probably more appropriate.

Everybody should need AASHTO.

We all are.

I think that's kind of the baseline.

But performance-based design is a challenge as a designer because if you're designing less than the standard, you have to demonstrate why that's appropriate and why that's appropriate and why that's safe in certain circumstances.

I don't know a lot of detail about this, but Honda did a similar study in Ohio with one of the universities up there through Safe Streets and Roads for All.

They did.

And thank you for mentioning that, Christine.

So that was kind of their test run.

And it was in the Columbus area, so another college

town scenario where, you know, there's just a lot of situations.

Our effort that we're proposing is a much larger scope and a much more holistic approach.

The only thing I'm wondering too about is, you know, when you're looking at strategies, there's the strategies that we don't have now, right?

So I think of think of Batesville where they've been,

the community like repaints on their own crosswalk and then VDOT wipes it out and then they repaint the crossing track because they know they need a crosswalk there.

That's a great point and a great question.

And I'm going to put on my old VDOT hat for a minute.

That gets things to not necessarily design decisions, but more operational considerations for maintenance.

A new project, that probably wouldn't be the case, but on a whole project, whether retrofitting or doing maintenance, the striping, non-striping really comes into play.

I'd be glad to help.

You mentioned the, you keep kind of mentioning a lot of standards and the standards are actually unrelated, I'm assuming.

Are you looking at any other recognized standards like NACTO's guidelines or the VDOT does, and where do you do?

And looking at maybe, oh, maybe this is the data period approach to not go for AASHTO standards, but go for NACTO standards and more context sensitive implementations.

because I know, I hear a lot of, I've heard a lot of engineers use, they kind of default to the green book as to why the industry has to have to put five lanes, but turn ready eye that causes fatalities.

It's a great point.

And I think yes, from the pedestrian side, we absolutely will.

I just don't think that's going to happen.

and I know they're working on revising their standards as well, but they are not as ahead of the game as things look like.

I didn't get that.

A little bit.

I guess based on your responses, the goal is to solely focus on actual standards and current VDOT standards.

I would answer that it depends who you talk to on the design team.

If you're talking to the road designer, they ask for a rainbow good vibe, which is good.

If you're talking to the traffic engineers, they have other sources that they, and there's negotiation on a lot of designs.

Do you imagine the outcome of this would be like some sort of like tool like a matrix with like different factors to consider or is it going to be more like a like a research paper like a white paper or like you know what I mean like we're asking like these very specific questions about like how to implement that like is there going to be something that's sort of we can put it in front of our design team and say these are all the factors that we need to consider in addition to

Great question.

Yeah.

So, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear before I'm on this slide, the results of this first and foremost would be to benefit people.

Right.

And whether that's tables or whatever, whatever they want.

There will certainly be research effort on the backside that can help in other areas, but there will be tangible and meaningful.

All right.

Any other questions on this?

And so what you need from us is a recommendation to the policy board that we go forward with this application, the unsafe streets and roads for all.

Lani is our second.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right.

Well, you have your recommendation for the policy board and you get to make that presentation again next week.

Probably the same one.

Thank you, Rob.

Thank you everybody for the time and especially thank you for those who helped work with us to get us to this point.

And probably good questions.

All right.

Just to say to everyone, we have received the draft Comprehensive Safety Action Plan.

It's currently going under review.

and we will be presenting to all six of the jurisdictions.

We actually conducted a presentation to the Nelson County Board of Supervisors on April 8th.

Just for CAMPO standards, the Albemarle presentation is on May 7th and the Charlottesville City Council is on May 5th.

For now.

For now.

There's a lot of information in the comprehensive safety action plan.

We're getting feedback from all of our jurisdictions.

We are also asking them to adopt the plan as long as it aligns with their expectations should they not have any feedback for it.

So we're going to meet again in June.

Do we do anything as a body in June with the safety action plan?

I assume by then we've had all the jurisdictions adopted.

Yeah, so as a regional project, the jurisdictions are the ones that have to adopt the plan because they have chapters in the plan specifically showing projects for their roads and issues.

Yes.

Go ahead, go ahead.

in the city of Charlottesville.

The survey closed last week.

We had 675 respondents.

Good job, Charlottesville.

See which one comes out on top.

But good response on there.

The draft existing conditions report has been developed and is under review.

Some of the technical staff is meeting with the consultants on Friday to review the draft report for that one and roll it right along on schedule.

For the US 29 war war and the bypass and interchange studies, that survey is currently being drafted.

So we have sent the draft survey out to the study work group member to review it and provide feedback by the end of this week.

That will launch on May 9th and it will wrap up on May 23rd.

So heads up if you need to coordinate with anybody in your communications teams to help get the word out on that one.

Traffic counts are also scheduled for later this month.

There were some delays getting this project going, initially just working off the scope and getting everything in place.

So we will need to keep it moving pretty efficiently, but there was some float time built into the schedule, so we should still be able to have that completed and ready for recommendations by Smartskate.

Thank you.

For the pipeline studies, we met with the contractor, the consultants last week to go over some of the setup, some of the preliminary stuff.

We do have a meeting with the stakeholders working group set up for Monday to talk about the two studies.

They're scheduling data collection later this month.

as well as, like I said, the kickoff meetings.

And then we're probably going to be meeting on site at some point to start to walk those sites and look at those locations for both the interchange at 118 and the interchange at 5th Street.

We've provided them, updated the studies that are currently data that we currently have for all the previous work that's been done.

All right.

I would love them in writing so I could go back to them.

Thank you.

So, um, what is that?

What is the pipeline called that, uh, for the interchange?

There are two separate studies.

One is for one 18.

It goes from, um, just North of Fontaine all the way through Teal lane to the South.

Um, we are looking at the park and ride lot at Teal lane, as well as,

what else we can do at the interchange to actually alleviate the southbound queuing, which is starting to become a problem.

and then at the other interchange we're looking at it goes from Harris Road through Pinehurst which is the first intersection to the south.

We're looking at not necessarily alternatives at the intersection because we did that last round for smart scale but we're looking at an alternative without the shared use path on the bridge.

So we're going to look at an alternative bridge separate for the shared use path or possible

We'll have more discussions about what we're going to try to do with that.

I know the county's looking at some other alternatives for shared these past cost 64 either through Biscuit Run or through Olinsburg Road and down that way.

So we're going to

have some discussions about that but basically we can't make the improvements at the bridge because it costs too much so we got to figure out how to reduce the cost so that's what we're doing we're also looking at that section north to tie into what the city wants to try to do on 5th street and south and then we're going to look at it's a

Wegmans Way, the 5th Street Station Parkway or Wegmans Way to see if we can make that intersection.

Those two intersections work better because they don't work very well right now.

But that's pretty much the gist of the study.

You said the county looking at alternatives to Crossing 64 sounds like.

Yeah, I mean, we have a whole different project that's fun to do designs,

It won't be a full 10 foot, but it'll be going under the highway right there and then... Wait, wait, wait.

I'm sorry.

What's the sidewalk?

Well, there's a pretty sidewalk underneath the highway.

Yeah.

It's like Azalea Park.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then Biscuit Rock.

Right now it's more Parks and Rec, but they're looking at that as well.

This morning I said, you and I need to talk.

We need to talk.

Awesome.

Well, I will say we're not really getting into weeds about where that crossing could be.

We were just, we had a crossing proposed along Fifth Street, and there are a lot of users on Fifth Street, especially from Southwood, that walk the corridor to get to the grocery stores north of 64.

That came out in the original Fifth Street study, so there are a lot of people that want to use that corridor as a necessity to get to and from

shopping and work and everything else that are a disadvantaged population.

So that's why we wanted to look at that because but I didn't want to look at something off alignment because it doesn't really serve them as well.

But we can have that discussion at some of the stakeholders group meetings to see where we want to go with the study to try to get the cost down because we do have a lot of crashes at the intersections at the interchange that are

I mean, those are two of the intersections that are some of the highest ranking in the district.

So I want to make sure we're coming up with solutions for them.

The DDI solves that problem, but if we can't get the cost down, we can't fix that problem.

And that's more of the issue than anything else.

And then there's issues at 5th Street Station, like I said, and Wegmans Way.

All right.

Any other questions on VDOT projects?

Here are none.

We can move on to our next segment, which is roundtable updates.

And I'll go ahead and kick us off, and Tom can fill in blanks.

For the city of Charlottesville, we've got a bunch of stuff going on, obviously.

So last month, we had our public engagement for the demonstration project that's associated with Safe Streets and Roads for All.

We're looking at a

Temporary test at the intersection of East High and Mead and East High and Stewart and Mead and Stewart.

That triangle on the east side of town.

Figuring out if, you know, changing some access there will make things safer for all the people.

going through that part of our community.

We got lots of great feedback on that.

We're pulling together the final design, which, if you looked at any of the options that we were proposing, aligns more with option two, where you'll have two-way traffic along Meade Street between East High and Stewart, but you won't be able to turn left onto Meade from East High, so that eliminates a dangerous left turn.

It also helps us square up the right turn

from Meade on to East High in a way that shortens up the crosswalk enough that we can actually put in a crosswalk.

So we are putting finishing touches on those designs and we'll be hopefully taking that to city council on the 5th along with the draft safety action plan to be adopted and then

will look to deploy it over the summer for about 60 days and see how it works.

Right now there's a little bit of a discussion amongst council of whether we're going to leave it in after 60 days or not, but right now we're saying that it's just a temporary test until they say otherwise.

The other big project that we're working on right now is the Fifth Street

Road Diet and Bikeway project.

We went out and did some public engagement for that last week.

We also have a survey going for that right now, and it should be up until the end of the month, so April 30th.

and then we'll be coming back with selecting some design options from that.

We're trying to figure out whether we go all the way to 5th Street Station with that or stop at Harris Road and some of that is do we want VDOT to fix the problems first before we come in with a cycle track or do we want to put a cycle track there first and then make VDOT cope with it and figure out a traffic solution for it.

We put that chicken and the egg question before the public and a few other design options and hope we get some good guidance on that towards the end of the month.

We would hope to also make that kind of a quick turnaround, putting out the design on the ground probably later this summer once we get all the materials for the protection element of that protected by claims.

The other

big project that we're working on is we've gotten a directive from the city manager's office to identify urgent transportation improvements around the city and also locations where we can test traffic calming devices.

We've been working through a list of those locations for about four months now.

we're closing in on it.

I think we're maybe having one of our final meetings later this afternoon on what does that list need to look like.

We have a budget of about a half a million dollars to go after quick build kind of projects to make a difference this year.

So we're hashing that out, should be publishing a list of what those will be in the next month.

and my last big update is we have hired our first transit planner in the city, Zoe McComer, who has joined us here.

Please say hi if you haven't met her already.

We're really excited to have her on board because we're going to be gearing up to do some prioritization work with CARTA over the next few months to figure out where the regional priorities for transit as well as talk sort of within the city of how much do we want to invest in our next fiscal year in local dollars into transit.

so that we can expand our services to what we had pre-pandemic and potentially beyond that.

So a lot of fun things cooking in the city right now, staying busy.

Yeah, so we installed 13 new bike racks down the street here.

A couple of them seem a little wonky, we need to fix those, but take a look.

Um, the transit center, we're gonna install somewhere by quality pie in the near future.

And, um, and we've got plans install, um, a bunch more throughout the city.

We've installed several schools and parks over the past six months as well.

Um,

But we're also working on a bike walk program, mainly a website.

And specifically, we're going to be working on getting bikecville.com up and running by Saturday ahead of Bike Month.

If you recall, this is an opportunity for us to promote the IZZY routes that we've been building as these kind of quiet bike routes throughout our community to the public.

And as part of that programming for Bike Month, we're going to leak out of bike rides out of Farmer's Market.

Saturdays in the month of May.

So come join us.

It's been very helpful for me thinking, how am I going to lead a group of people throughout our community on bikes?

And then it really identifies conflict points.

when you have to think in those terms.

But we're also looking for help at our bike valet for Fridays After 5, so if anybody, I know that Sarah and Isabella are going to be there.

May, I think the last, or maybe not.

We're going to be... You're going to be at the farmers market, Saturday farmers market.

Well, we are scheduled to you are scheduled.

OK, perfect.

So and then also just want to say that the neighborhood walks are going really well.

We had one on Sunday that we partnered with UVA and build it a tremendous job kind of leading us through grounds and capital G alert and partner.

Alright, and the other part, Lonnie, you mentioned Ragon Mountain.

We're partnering with Ragon Mountain.

We started a couple couple weeks ago, so that was our first walk on partnering with Ragon Mountain on these these neighborhood walks.

So our next one is through Woollen Mills on Mother's Day, May 11th, and Ben is going to be leading that one.

It varies up and down.

So this last one was north of 25 folks.

In July of last year, I think we got four.

I think that we're still finding our footing on how to get the word out about it, which is where Bike Seabill comes into play because we've already gotten

and that's another announcement is we've already got a thousand people sign up for our Bike What See Bill newsletter and the only mechanism to promote that right now is to the e-bike voucher program so that that should be something I should say we have our second round of e-bike vouchers first round

were super successful.

We issued 25 vouchers and about 12 people have gotten e-bikes in the city of Charlottesville because of the voucher program and they have another two weeks, three weeks to redeem their voucher and they'll be issuing another 25 on May 7th.

So if you are a city resident and not a city employee, which we are dealing with once,

The major update for us is we just launched the transportation chapter for our comprehensive plan.

I'll say that I reviewed it already and it looks very good.

We're going through each chapter.

We're dealing with old bodies and then going through and edit.

So at this point, we're anticipating adoption in October.

Okay, for the whole thing.

That's light at the end of the tunnel, though.

Yeah, I do.

Pinging off of Tommy's update about Bike Month, while that starts in May, we're doing a lot of gearing up right now, particularly for the Bike Month Business Challenge.

This will be our second year.

We had great success last year with 13 businesses participating, which I thought was wonderful for just getting it off the ground.

So we're hoping to

to match that or beat it for this year.

So the opportunity is any business can sign up, you form a team with your employees, and then everyone through the Connecting VA app logs their bike trips during the month of May and

We declare a winner of the most trips taken and the most miles biked.

There is an algorithm to even it out.

So, you know, with the teams, you know, somebody has 30 people and somebody has three people.

We do some magic to make that come out so that it's fair for everybody.

And we're currently in the process of seeking some partners and sponsorships to have really cool prizes to award.

folks with that, so I don't have the exact info as to what you win, besides some pretty outstanding bragging rights.

And this is a friendly competition, we'll say.

The city was one of the winners last year, as well as the UVA Sustainability Office.

So it's kind of a lot of good fun to get out and really enjoy biking in lovely May weather, fingers crossed.

In addition to that, we did have our CAP strategic

plan finally approved since the last time that we met.

We are also continuing with the DRPT campaigns.

Right now it is connecting commuters, so we're promoting carpooling and vanpooling a little bit more heavily.

Obviously, we promote that all the time with our Connecting PA app and as well as Guaranteed Ride Home.

We have some radio ads as well as some digital advertising that's going out for that.

Most of that will obviously switch over come May for bike month.

All right, great.

Vida, I don't think y'all have any other updates, but if you do, I'd like to give you the floor.

Because of current federal goings on, we've extended our FPO application, or that you've either been through funding and told you the second, that email probably just in your inboxes, but you're in this meeting.

So you have a little more time there and hopefully we'll get the allocations as quickly as they can get them to us.

Our NPO webinar is on our YouTube channel, so if anyone is super curious and has an hour or 20 to burn, you can learn about our relationship with our NPO grantees across the state.

As of April 1, we have a new STIP process that we're working with our finance team on.

It's more on the admin side, so more for the MPO.

It shouldn't impact any of our voting bodies across the state, but we're trying to refine it ahead of a joint procurement with VDOT on a management software.

So, fun to come.

VTA, our Virginia Transit Association annual meeting, it is May 28th, 29th in Richmond, so registration's open for that.

I highly encourage everyone to come to learn more about transit opportunities and

presentations across the board on workforce development, all the way to management and planning.

Thank you Mitch.

We don't have anybody from FHWA or FTA or technically CAT, but I will give an update for CAT.

Last night our city council adopted their budget.

I did not include any expansions to CAT service, but as part of their budget adoption, they said we need to start talking about FY 27 right now.

So I have a meeting today.

We had our budget adopted last night.

We have our first meeting about the budget for next year.

today.

So we're starting right off the bat, trying to figure out how we can expand service in North here.

Yeah.

Well, let's see, where were we last time?

The board has met a couple of times, and we've been updating our TDP, which is the last of the employment act of the two, mostly just polishing it and looking at what vectors that have been checked off, things that maybe don't need to be a priority.

And then

So we've been working on that.

One of those roles is to do regular customer ridership satisfaction surveys.

So we'll be doing that this April and May.

So we'll look forward to having some support from all of you in your various roles and constituents.

We're keeping it short and simple, focused on service, both for demand response and for the connect, queue to bus.

And we also want to hit populations that are not necessarily riders.

We want to figure out why people are not riding, what the barriers are, potentially.

And so, yeah.

Another goal is to update our technology software.

That's a couple-year project, and we put a grant application into our PT.

I believe all those grants are now before the Commonwealth Transportation Board provided assuming them.

We're awaiting those to see what we can do next.

Yeah, a couple of things.

Well, first, your annual reminder that graduation weekend is May 16th through the 18th, so plan your tricks accordingly.

And then, following that, as a lot of you know, RWSA has a major project to upgrade their raw water lines between Maggie Mountain Reservoir and the O'Hill Waste Park Water Treatment Plan.

Part of the route is going to go right up Hereford Drive.

So after graduation, after students are moved out, they're going to hit it hard this summer to get that section of pipe in.

So that road will be, for all intents and purposes, closed for most of this summer.

I think they have a July, in July deadline, they've got a performance deadline.

So they've got a detour plan, a closure plan.

Yeah, it's going to be a fun couple years.

Alright, well that is, do you have any other updates from UVA?

So that's our last updates.

We have no additional new members from the public show up, so we're good to go.

I can go ahead and adjourn us.