Rural Transportation Advisory Committee Meeting   7/20/2021

All right, I motion to approve the minutes.

Second.

Sure.

So as far as the remote participation policy, basically we are located in the city of Charlottesville, who is still under a locally adopted state of emergency.

So consistent with the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, we are continuing to hold meetings remotely for right now until the state of emergency is lifted for Charlottesville with an option that anybody who chooses could attend a person.

However, outside of the state of emergency, the General Assembly has allowed for an adoption of a remote meeting policy for local bodies to provide some opportunity for them to continue to allow remote participation in certain circumstances.

Those circumstances are pretty general, but basically

If you have a health situation that prohibits you from being able to participate in cleaning or are a caregiver for somebody else who needs medical caregiving that you're providing, if you're traveling or if there's any sort of other more general personal issue, you have the opportunity to participate remotely provided that

There is an in-person quorum that still symbols and then there's a process that you would have to go through.

So if you know you will not be able to be in attendance due to one of the allowable reasons which were listed in the policy that we provided to you, you would notify the chair of a committee and let them know which of those exceptions or situations applies to your situation.

and then the quorum, the in-person quorum of the membership would be able to vote to allow your participation and that would be reflected in feminist.

So it allows up to either 25% of your participation to be done remotely based on the situations that are outlined in the policy or two meetings per year, whichever one is greater.

So for you all, since we meet every other month, it would be two meetings.

that you would be allowed to participate remotely.

Basically, in order for you all to have this option, we would just need you to adopt the policy.

The policy was developed consistent with the regulations that have been outlined by the General Assembly.

So we're just offering you all the opportunity to meet remotely.

And if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

I would like to say something briefly.

I brought this up at the RTP meeting, I think, but I remain a little bit concerned about item C that the minutes shall reflect with specificity the nature of the personal matter.

I think it'd be strange for me or my family member's medical condition to be recorded in the minutes.

Yeah, and this is basically just reflected by the language that's from the General Assembly.

So what I would say is that you wouldn't necessarily have to name the specific condition, but basically just name

Just to explain, I am unable to attend due to providing care for a family member who has a illness, something like that.

So not overly specific, but tells you which of those categories applies to your specific situation.

Sandy, in this remote policy, that's only after Charlottesville lifts its state of emergency.

And like I said, we'll officially be holding the meetings remotely.

So anybody who wants to participate can, but there's not a requirement for there to be in-person quorum present physically at our location.

Okay, thanks.

Sorry.

It sounds like maybe at some point in September, but I don't think that that has been decided.

Okay, thanks.

We could do by hand or roll call, doesn't matter.

Do by hand.

All those four, raise your hand.

All right, all those against?

I have a question also in the future.

That's fine with me.

Works for me.

Oh, I see.

All right.

Let me see if I can share my screen.

Great.

All right.

So let's get started then.

My name is Stephen Johnson for those who don't know me well, and I work as the planning manager at Jaunt.

And today I was asked to talk a little bit about Jaunt and transportation.

So my plan is to take about 15 minutes of my time to try to get through this material to save 10 minutes for questions and discussion.

We'll see how well I do that because I'm going to try to talk about a lot.

But what I'd like to cover is what does Jaunt do today and what could Jaunt do tomorrow to establish a baseline for those who are not very familiar with how Jaunt operates.

And then I'd like to pivot a little bit and talk about how I think of improving transit, particularly using a customer experience framework, because I have a software development background and that's how people make good software.

and I think it's pretty interesting and I'd love to get other people's perspective on that.

So what does Jaunt do today?

Well, Jaunt is a transit provider and we serve seven localities in Virginia, six counties and the city of Charlottesville.

Of those, everybody except for Buckingham and Greene County are Jaunt shareholders.

So Jaunt is a public service corporation, which means we are not part of any local government.

We are an independent corporation, but our

Shareholders are exclusively local governments and we have a public mandate.

I don't know exactly why Buckingham is not a shareholder, but I do know that their financial contribution and service are pretty small.

So maybe it's just more trouble than it was worth.

Greene County, we started last year, so we assumed management of Greene County Transit.

And that relationship is still in transition.

So I think it's possible that Greene County will become a shareholder in the future.

That will be up to the existing shareholders and Greene County to come to an agreement on that.

But the shareholders have just a little bit more formal authority in managing Jaunt.

They have voting positions on our board rather than non-voting.

In terms of the kinds of service that Jaunt operates, our major category is demand response service.

So this is service that the customer has to call in at least a day in advance to make a reservation for their trip.

There's a negotiation process.

If their first request, there's no availability, we might be able to go back and forth and find something else that does work for the customer.

But then the goal is by the time they get off the phone, they've got an idea of when their pickup window is going to be and the availability of the trip.

The reason that we do require that reservation in advance is that that allows us to work more efficiently in a rural service area.

So if you think of a county like Louisa, that's really big and not very dense, we want to be able to build schedules that are as efficient as possible.

So if we collect all that information ahead of time, we can make the best use of those public dollars to operate the service.

Within that service, we've really got three categories.

Our circulator service connects one area.

So an example would be the Crozet circulator or the Louisa circulator.

You can get picked up anywhere in that area and dropped off anywhere in that area during the hours of operation.

Second type is our link service.

So these connect to different places.

An example would be our Fluvanna midday that picks up passengers in Fluvanna in the morning, drops them off in Charlottesville and urban Albemarle in the afternoon.

in the morning and then does the return trip in the afternoon.

So that's typical of our link services.

They connect two different places and they tend to go one direction in the morning with a return trip later.

So that's good for work or running errands in town, et cetera.

Then we've got our ADA service, and this is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it's linked to CATS fixed route service.

So the ADA service area is defined as a three quarter mile buffer around CATS fixed routes.

Our hours of operation have to at least match CATs and our price can't be more than double CATs price.

So it's really important that we are coordinating with CAT because if they expand their service network, that comes with an ADA price for Albemarle and Charlottesville.

And if CAT goes fare free, our ADA service also has to go fare free.

So that covers our demand response service.

Next, we've got our fixed route commuter.

These are all of our connect services.

We've got four of them right now.

And these, you do not need a reservation.

There's a published schedule.

You show up when the buses is advertised to be there and you get on and you're able to ride.

So those are the 29 North, Crozet, Buckingham, and Fluvanna connect services.

And all of those services are bringing commuters into Charlottesville and urban Albemarle.

And then last, we've got our human service agency service.

So these are organizations like Java, Blue Ridge PACE, Logisticare.

These are our big companies that are doing mostly health services in our region.

And they contract with us to help provide transportation for their clients to and from their services.

So there's a lot of variety here.

We've got two to three dozen different service types.

And if you go on our website, ridejaunt.org, you can learn more about all of those, but that's really unusual.

There's a lot of transit agencies that do their fixed route service because that's what they think of as transit.

And then they do the ADA because it's mandatory.

There's very few areas in the country that have as much variety of rural transit service as we do.

And I think that's really cool that that Jaunt has built this relationship with all these localities and we're able to provide transit service for rural communities.

So I think we should be proud of ourselves for that.

This slide shows a little bit of statistics from fiscal year 20 before our last, you know, mostly normal year before COVID hit.

And you can see some of our statistics here.

Most of our trips are ADA and the 18%, that's the other, the link and, and circulator services and then connect services, 15, 17% of our trips and the agency is 24.

So mostly ADA, but we do have that rural component as well.

So in terms of what Jaunt could do tomorrow, we're here to be a partner with our localities.

So really we can do whatever localities want.

Particularly, you know, we hope to help localities reach their access, equity and environmental objectives.

So we're here to be a partner.

We don't have an agenda that we want to maximize transit ridership or get more people to stop driving.

You know, we're really here to give options to the localities and help them achieve their goals.

We negotiate separately with each locality, so that's really cool.

We give each locality a chance to articulate what their priorities are.

And the services that Buckingham would fund would be really different from the services that Louisa or Albemarle will fund.

But if you've ever been on either side of a budget negotiation process, you know how difficult that can be.

Imagine having to do that seven times.

It's a pretty significant challenge.

But if we're doing it well, we want officials, constituents to collaborate, to identify what are the best services out there.

And then hopefully we can fund those.

We want to set those elected officials up to be the heroes saying yes, to provide a service that's valuable to the community as much as we can.

And then my last point here, I think there's an untapped opportunity.

have any great examples today of services that were negotiated with multiple localities.

So our Buckingham Connect service mostly brings Buckingham employees to Charlottesville businesses.

But that exists just because Buckingham said that was a priority.

I think you could argue that Charlottesville benefits from that, but Charlottesville is not helping to pay for that service currently.

I wonder if there are services out there that would be helpful to our community

but no single locality would choose to fund them alone.

But if multiple localities could collaborate then it would suddenly seem like a great idea.

So I'm hoping that's a direction where we can grow in the future is facilitating more conversations across localities.

And then I wanna talk a little bit about on demand transit which you may have heard of.

This is a new service mode.

So we've got fixed route, we've got demand response, we've got our commuter buses.

On demand would be a new option.

And if you've ever taken a ride share service like Uber or Lyft, then you know what on demand is.

That's what it is.

You are using an app or a website to book a call, book a trip and it's same day you figure out when your driver's coming, et cetera, et cetera.

And we'd like to offer that to our localities as a service option.

And there's a lot of advantages to that.

First of all, it's more responsive.

You don't have to book a day in advance.

You can get a trip same day.

And that could be a really good fit for the sort of middle density options.

So in a really rural place like Louisa, we wouldn't want to necessarily get a call from one corner of the County and then be like, all right, we'll send a vehicle out right away.

And then we get a call on the opposite end and it's like, Oh gosh, what do we do now?

So there are some rural places where we still need to plan the schedule in advance, but for these middle density options like Crozet or the town of Louisa, or, you know, whatever little pocket you have.

We could put these services and it could be a really good fit.

And then if you imagine pairing that with something like fixed route, that we could have these on-demand nodes, and then we string them together with the fixed route.

That could be a way that we provide some new innovative service options in the future.

And another really cool thing is this low operating commitment.

When you do a fixed route, you better do a study and figure out that that fixed route is going to work.

Cause it's a lot of money to buy the bus.

You're going to publish the schedule.

You're going to have the driver out there all the time.

regardless of whether anyone's riding.

With on demand, you just make the service and the software, and if it's pulling from the same pool of drivers, if you were wrong and there's no demand for it, then there's no trip requests.

And so you don't deviate any resources over there.

So the cost of experimentation is really low.

And I'm really excited to see how that pans out, that we can test new services really quickly and cheaply.

If they work out well, we can grow them.

If they don't, then we didn't really lose much.

But I think to use this successfully, we do need to find ways to incorporate it into land use and transportation planning as a kind of infrastructure.

So if we're identifying a growth area where we're gonna try to focus some of our development, I think at that moment, that's when we should be figuring out, okay, let's commit to having an on-demand service or a demand response service or whatever needs to be part of that planning.

And I'm curious how that would shape our land use and development.

So I've got four minutes left.

I'll probably go a little over, but I want to talk a little bit about customer experience.

Some assumptions I'm making is that transit offers some benefits to our community.

Congestion, carbon reduction, rural preservation, transportation equity.

And whenever somebody chooses transit, instead of driving, we're reaping some of these benefits as a community.

And then the more they choose to take transit, the more benefit will reap.

But we may never replace all automobile trips with transit.

So those are my assumptions going forward.

Now thinking about customer experience, if you've never heard of that before, here's a quote from the founder of CX Journey.

Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with an organization over the life of the relationship with that company or with that brand.

In other words, I want to know

How is somebody deciding whether or not they're going to take transit or whether they're going to drive or walk or take a bike?

Customer experience gives us a way to think about that and answer that question.

So to help think about customer experience, I would put forward these three pillars.

The first is education.

So does your customer even know how to use transit?

If they don't use it, that they can't really move forward.

So that's the baseline is they've got to know that your service exists and how to use it.

The second is the cost benefits.

So why would they choose to take transit over driving or biking or whatever?

And this is, I think the meat of customer experience is this cost benefit analysis.

And then there's a third piece that's a little less tangible, the emotional side.

So when you watch a car commercial.

They want you to think of that car as part of your identity.

There, there's an emotional play there.

So when we think about transit or any other choice, there's an emotional value component that influences whether people would choose to do that or not.

We need to think about that as well.

So when we think about transit trips in the context of this framework, you know, we think about riding the bus and there's a lot of facets of the customer experience that we can start looking at right away.

Does the customer know how to pay?

Do they know when they need to get off the bus?

Are they comfortable while they're riding the bus?

Are the chairs comfortable?

Is there a cup holder for their coffee?

You know, there's really nothing too small.

It's all making a contribution to their experience and whether or not they're going to take transit.

Do they feel safe when they're on the bus?

There's going to be other people there.

Are they going to feel comfortable with those people?

But this is really only a small part of the whole transit trip.

And so we really need to broaden our perspective and think about, well, before they even get on the bus, they've got to get to the bus stop.

They need to know where it is.

They need to know, is there going to be shelter there?

Am I going to be standing in the sun or the rain or the snow while I wait for the bus?

Will I be able to sit down?

Is there going to be a trash can or maybe a nearby coffee shop?

What kinds of amenities will there be?

at this bus stop.

And then again, will I feel safe?

Is this going to be well lit at night?

Is it in a part of town where I'm going to feel comfortable?

These kinds of questions.

If they need to transfer, they're going to wonder if their transfer is on time.

Did they miss their transfer?

Am I going to have to run to go catch my transfer?

And these are all parts of the customer experience.

But finally, once they've arrived and gotten off the bus, how far do they need to walk to get to their final destination?

If it's a hot day and they're going to break a sweat, you know, am I going to have a shower available for me at work?

If I'm going, taking a transit trip to a shop or a store, will I be able to transport whatever I just bought?

So there's a lot of different elements to the customer experience for transit trips.

And when you start to compare some of these things to driving, it's no wonder that people choose to drive.

Where's my car?

Well, it's in the driveway where I left it.

When can I leave?

Anytime I want.

Am I going to be comfortable with the other people on board?

Well, it's just me.

So hopefully, you know, and so when we start to do these kinds of comparisons, it really becomes clear why more people aren't taking transit and some of the changes that we need to make to this experience to bring more people on board.

The challenge is that in a traditional business, you're really responsible for all the parts of your customer experience.

Designing your product, you're marketing your product, you're selling it, you're offering customer support.

Like everything's in your control, but that's really not the case for transit.

Yes, we have the transit providers.

We're maintaining the buses, setting the schedules, training our drivers, handling payment, communicating with our riders about service disruptions, but we're not alone.

You also have to think about local government.

They're defining land use.

They're setting what are the A's and B's and how far apart are they from each other.

They're regulating urban design to do setbacks and figure out what is the experience to get to the building.

They're shaping the public road network.

Am I going to have to weave through a bunch of cul-de-sacs in order to get to somebody's house to pick them up and not to be underestimated?

They're funding public transit.

So we're relying on local government as our partners for funding.

We've got to think about land developers.

They're responsible for site development.

They decide where the bus stop is going to be placed.

Are there going to be sidewalks or trees or awnings that are going to make the experience comfortable walking to or from the bus stop?

I like to think about grocery stores.

Wegmans in Charlottesville is a great example.

If you think about where people park, the spots closest to the door always fill up first.

And then you've got a second ring and a third ring.

And then you've got those spots all the way in the back that are always empty except for the day before Thanksgiving.

So those are the least desirable spots because people don't want to walk.

And then past that, that's where the bus stop is.

So those kinds of things are, are things that are influenced by the land developer.

And then last we've got business owners.

So are we putting coffee shops or other placemaking businesses near a transit stop so that while I'm waiting for my bus, I feel like I'm connected to the life in my community.

If I'm an employer and I want my employees to be able to take transit to work, am I going to be providing shower facilities in case it's a really hot day and they're breaking a sweat?

Or if I own a business and I want my customers to feel comfortable taking transit to get to my business, I want to make sure, Lowe's is a good example.

If they're going to buy a bunch of lumber, I want to make sure they can take transit and then rent a truck to take their lumber home.

Return the truck and then they could take transit back.

So all those kinds of considerations will influence the customer experience of taking transit.

So there's a lot of challenges here.

Distributed ownership over the transit customer experience.

I'm not in control of every part of the customer experience of a Jaunt customer.

And that's tough.

And I don't think we have strong established relationships between all these diverse stakeholders.

thinking about how are we going to make a compelling customer experience for transit.

And in order to do that, we need to have consistent long range planning and investment between all these stakeholders.

Single occupancy automobiles have a huge head start on this.

There's already tons of investment done for cars, and that takes the form of parking minimums,

Individuals are used to spending thousands of dollars on a car and gas and insurance.

All that is just seen as normal.

So there's a lot of cultural shift that would need to take place to have this kind of alternative.

But I'm hoping that with this in mind, we can shift away from the sort of transit band-aid approach.

People will say, oh, we've got this development and there's a lot of traffic.

Can we like put a bus stop and maybe that will fix it all?

And I would say, no, we really need to be thinking about it from a customer experience perspective, because just building a bus stop doesn't mean anybody's going to actually want to ride.

And so that's where I think we need to be thinking as planners, because if we're not building transit systems that people want to ride, we're not really doing anything for our community.

So that's how I think about building better transit.

And I'm only a little bit over, but we can switch over now to some questions and discussion.

I really enjoyed it.

Who has questions?

I have a question.

Yes, the University of Virginia is a huge driver of transit.

We don't do as much with the community colleges.

So it's mostly UVA.

But definitely, we try to have lists of who are the biggest businesses and universities.

We're the biggest trip generators.

Stephen, one question I have is I'm sure you haven't asked these questions, like some of the questions that you proposed in your presentation without thinking through them a little bit first.

So one of the questions I had is you talked about are there ways for multiple jurisdictions to work together to sort of find those opportunities that will serve multiple purposes.

Well, I know we've been having some planning initiatives lately around Zion Crossroads, so I would love to hear Louisa and Fluvanna talk about what kinds of transit opportunities exist there.

In terms of funding, I think, I don't know much about the legalese of it, but maybe some kind of memorandum about what is the funding arrangement going to be, who's going to pay, how much of what,

I think for all of our services, we want to have some service design standards that should be met.

So what should be our minimum passengers per service hour or something else, something like that, that will help us measure is this service succeeding?

Is it, is it getting the ridership that we expect it to?

And that may take a little time for people to get used to it and for the service to ramp up, but if it doesn't,

We would want to be able to identify that and then reallocate those monies to a different idea that might work better.

I have a few questions actually more related to the buses themselves.

Do you guys offer

Storage for bicycles.

And then do you have Wi-Fi and outlets on your buses?

Yeah, those are great questions.

So when we launched the Crozet Connect in fiscal year 20, that was a big opportunity for us.

It was a service that had long been demanded by Albemarle County.

And when we did that, we also brought the Buckingham

Lovingston, and 29 North routes, which had existed previously.

We brought them all under this Connect brand and we got new buses.

We rewrapped the buses.

And when we did get those, we invested in USB charging ports.

There's wifi on the buses.

All of our Connect buses do have bike racks.

There are times when we have not had enough bike capacity.

The ones we have only carry two bikes.

The buses carry 23 passengers.

So if you see any ideas for how to get more bikes on there, we'd love that.

But yeah, those kinds of amenities are things that we've tried to look at.

And I think they help.

I still think that there's a pretty big gap in terms of the comfort of riding a bus compared to driving.

It is little things like the seat.

Is it comfortable to sit down?

You know, we made sure that there were cupholders on our connect routes.

But, you know, there's a lot of transit systems that they don't even allow you to have beverages on the bus because they don't want you to spill it and then have to clean it up.

And if you've never ridden on a body on chassis bus, which is the majority of Jaunt's vehicles, it's like a Ford chassis that's purchased.

And then there's a Virginia company that we work with and they retrofit it to have

You know, it's a small bus on the chassis.

They're they're noisy.

They're really rattly.

And it's not a very smooth ride.

So I think there's a million different aspects of just the vehicle alone that you could improve to make the transit experience more compelling.

But that that takes people in transit asking for those things.

And if all the transit agencies are just settling because, oh, this is what's available.

So I guess we'll we'll get that.

Hey Stephen, this is Douglas from Fluvanna.

So quick kind of two part question, user opportunity right now we're at $3 a gallon over $3.

Do you guys factor in like if gas goes up to $4 in a year or two and what the second part of that is,

Are your buses gas, diesel, future electric, propane?

Yeah, so right now, most of what we operate is gasoline.

I don't think we would see fares change from a customer perspective if gas prices went up.

So that's one of the advantages of public transit is that it is a service subsidized by public government.

And that gives us an opportunity to isolate some of those kinds of fluctuations from the customer.

We have a fuel reserve built into our budget to handle the cost, unexpected costs like that.

So I don't think those things would impact the user experience directly and from a fair perspective.

We do own a small number of electric vehicles.

We've got a couple of staff vehicles and we have one transit vehicle that is all electric.

And we're excited to have that.

We are excited to be making a commitment towards green energy and it will be a cheaper fuel source for us.

But

There is still some opportunity for growth of the technology in terms of reliability, not only having enough charge, but operating well under all operating conditions, weather in particular.

And there's a lot of hills in our region.

So your mileage may vary literally when it comes to that electric vehicle.

So it remains something we're interested in.

It gets rotated occasionally into our urban service around Charlottesville and Albemarle.

That gives us more control over

needing to bring it back to charge.

There aren't really, there's no on the go charging that we do that I'm aware of.

I'm not aware of any like senior center that has an EV charge and we plug in while we're unloading and loading wheelchairs.

It certainly could happen in the future.

Unlike a personal automobile, I think it's probably easier to plan around

Where do people get dropped off for a bus?

So I think that is a little bit more predictable.

And I think it would be easier to build that infrastructure and know you're going to get a lot of use out of it.

You're not going to have a bus charge for 15 minutes and then park for two hours taking up that spot.

So there are opportunities there.

So does it look like that vehicle is mostly like a morning late afternoon shift with like a midday charge?

We do allow service animals, but I do not think our policy currently allows pets.

That will depend.

It changes on a service by service basis.

Some services are seven days a week.

Some are five days a week.

Some are only three days a week.

Some are one day every other week.

But if you go on our website, it's got all of the schedules laid out for every service.

Thanks.

Was there another question?

Well, I'm five minutes over my time, so I will yield the floor.

Thank you.

That's me.

And thank you, Stephen, for that wonderful presentation.

So I'm the new staff person for RTAC and part of our core plan for this year is to do a strategic plan for the committee and I wanted to talk with you all today about the first steps of that strategic plan and introduce the project.

This will also help me serve you as a staff person to understand better what your needs are and how this committee can best meet your needs.

So I'll just go over the steps for creating the strategic plan and then we can talk about the first couple of items.

So we're going to create a vivid description of what our final destination is.

And I think for this committee, it'll be a little different than the final destination, but more what services we can provide to the community.

Determine the steps that we'll take to achieve our vision.

and determine how we'll achieve the vision and goals and objectives that they get finally from across the organization regarding the details of the strategic plans that have been across our community.

I can share.

I think probably the, in Greene at least, our biggest help from the committee is on larger scale planning activities where there is staff or even potential

Anybody else?

Yeah, so I'm just kind of trying to get an idea for the vision for the strategic plan of what the vision for this committee is.

So like, what goals and objectives do we want to meet?

I'm curious about sort of the relationship building side of it.

Like if this committee did not exist, where would we all be talking to each other?

Like what other alternatives are there?

I think the answer is we'd only be talking to each other if we had a question

We wanted to find out what other localities are doing to resolve, unfortunately.

So I agree with what Stephen's saying and also agree with Jim is that this is a great place for us to bounce ideas off of each other.

I'd just like to take a moment to reassure Stephen that I will talk to him if he gets lonely.

This is Douglas from Fluvanna.

I would say Lucinda that I think it's really important for this group to be involved on a quarterly basis because

The work that we do, or at least where I also used to work in another PDC office that supported us, we had so many diverse needs in the rural areas.

And David Cook talked about this earlier at our last meeting about economic development scoring and SMART SCALE, right?

Because everything's rural and by conditional use or somewhere might be zoned commercial, but not have any activity yet.

And so with the traffic counts and road diagrams and road geometry and everything that can be so skewed as opposed to a grid system in urban areas, it's real important for the group to work together.

And I'd really like to see going forward more of

cross-jurisdictional work in corridors like Fluvanna and Albemarle and Guchland and Fluvanna and you know Buckingham and talking about Buckingham using Jaunt so you know Buckingham and Fluvanna on Route 15 I mean there's

different PDCs that also sometimes need to collaborate with one another if they leave into another area.

And I'm glad to see like, you know, Nelson and the Lynchburg folks on the western side of us.

I think that's a great idea.

You know, we could be inviting members of other PDCs to our meeting and vice versa, or we could be reaching out to localities is, you know, hey, would you like to join a meeting?

You may not be a member of the association, but it doesn't mean that we still don't value you.

I mean, what's going on?

Yes, Sandy, I would say that

I think it would be helpful sometimes for us to maybe see some of the minutes of the MPOs.

I mean, I'd go and look at it on your web page or hear about it from our board member and other commissioners and stuff here.

But sometimes maybe also inserting Gretchen or Lucinda to put in the MPO minutes for us to look at.

We might not read them.

We might read them page by page.

So I think that would be nice and vice versa.

They may want to see some of ours.

So sometimes

As like Tom and I know that, you know, eventually Fluvanna and Louisa might be in the MPO in the next census count.

So like, I think the VITA reps have told us so, you know, it's just helpful to kind of keep tracking following that.

I think it's important to make sure we're all headed in the same direction too.

Like I know each locality has unique needs, you know, and a unique vision, but for me personally, it's helpful, you know, to reach out to people and in the same region or, you know, in some more localities to make sure that we're keeping up with current

Anything else?

There's nothing else.

Part of the strategic planning process is to develop a list of stakeholders that need to be engaged in the strategic planning process.

So I wasn't sure if you guys had any ideas about stakeholders that we have included in the strategic plan.

I think that it's pretty much this group and any members that aren't in attendance today.

I don't know that trying to involve any other members of the community would enhance anything.

I assume that the rest of my counterparts would present the information

and update their governing bodies about the things that are being discussed and get approvals for anything that are necessary.

The only thing I could see adding is that I don't know whether UVA requires in their planning program a studio, group class studio or individual charrette or whatever.

If they're working on something regionally that we may not even know that they're working on, we could see that presentation.

But again, I don't know whether those schools are recycling the same projects

Every third year or something like that, we're going to do another studio on this road or this area.

So we'd have to reach out and ask them.

I think it might be worth revisiting after we've maybe clarified the mandate of the committee.

One thing I would like to say is that we represent the localities.

We represent the transportation department and the regional body.

And we've got RideShare and Jaunt.

I mean, we do have a growing movement of multimodalism going on.

And not that there's anybody out there to represent that group, but it would be good if there were advocates that could possibly represent that group that attended these meetings to pursue more bike and pedestrian opportunities throughout the process.

And I don't know how we could do that.

I mean, we all sort of have that role as part of our job description, but that might be something we might want to think on how we can include that in the future.

The other thing is, I know with the adoption of DRPT and the state taking on some of the railroad, there may be some opportunities there to expand for stops in some of the rural areas.

Yeah, Chuck mentioned this multimodal movement.

It may be interesting just to look at the plans across the region and figure out what are the elements that are shared by 50%, 60%, 80% of everybody here.

Well, I know the MPOs and combining with the city and the county, they're doing a one map project where they're trying to digitize all of their systems into one

Overall map that shows all of the bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

And I know the PDC has done a project several years ago on bike route 76.

So it would be, that might be something we might want to think about expanding to the whole region in the future as a way to sort of track where those are and to identify where the greatest needs are.

That's a good point, Chuck.

On that note, too, there's a lot of discussion now with these regional trail connections as well, corridors and recreational or transportation related.

Chuck, this is Douglas and Fluvanna.

At the last board meeting, we just had the Fluvanna Leadership Development Program.

One of the participants in this year's 2021 class, he worked on the Transamerica bike route 76 to divert bike traffic off of 15 onto Main Street, which we're doing our TAP grant.

Application with Tom Fitzpatrick on.

So, you know, it's going to take some time just to get that one little segment and it'll pop back out over onto Pleasant Grove through our trail system and then back on to 15.

Yeah, I would agree.

I mean, and I know there's a push for the Three Notch Trail, so it's called, that runs along the 250 corridor.

I know it's been pushed in Albemarle County quite extensively, and we're going to probably look at some of that next year.

But I know there's been some discussions about extending it eastward into Fluvanna and Louisa, Fort Richmond.

So I think there's an opportunity there that we can start focusing on.

Yeah, that's right.

We're working with Chris Janczyk and Peter Kreps on through Fluvanna and Goochland.

Goochland to the east of us is doing the same.

Something that's been gaining attention as well is our rural pavings.

I think I mentioned it at every other meeting with y'all, but it's definitely getting more attention towards what is going on in our rural areas and what infrastructure improvements are occurring on these roads.

It's really the only type of

The development in our rural areas that the board besides outside of major road and intersection improvements that the board is involved with on these and it's about paving gravel roads as rural rustics paving and there's been a lot of input from the bike community

about keeping these roads as gravel.

And so this is definitely a good discussion that we're having internally with the county.

Yeah.

Thanks you guys.

I got a lot of good ideas.

It sounds like kind of,

Bouncing ideas off of each other and education on new technologies and planning and regulations is kind of what I'm seeing in between.

Thanks.

I don't know if you have anything else.

I was like pulling teeth around here.

I'll start at the round table.

I don't have anything really to report, so I'll move on to the next one.

I'll say outside what I just mentioned on the rural paving is that was approved on several roads.

Again, we're looking at how to keep the public more involved in that process, keep people there.

Some of these roads are partitioned 10 years ago to be paved and property ownership switches hands.

Some property owners are finding out the first time that this road is going to be paved and we're trying to make more all user involved in this process, all types of users on these roads.

on these gravel roads to be paved if they are to be paved.

Something else we just did in collaboration with Greene County, I worked with Alan, I think it's Alan Yost from Economic Development, Jim.

And this is two years in the making, we were able to

Come together, this is like the first project I started on, Virginia Byway Requests for Route 810, 24810 from Crozet.

It's a DCR VDOT designation for aesthetic value and provides recreational opportunities, natural resource opportunities, scenic views.

So this designation, at a public hearing, VDOT DCR evaluated the road.

They recommended it for

Virginia, by designation.

So we held a public hearing and now it's going to the CTB probably in the fall.

That actually encompasses Madison County also.

Right, it's going to be a complete greenway, a complete byway, Virginia byway from our park entrance that where Nelson and Albemarle meet like 250 Virginia byway up all the way up.

I think it goes to Front Royal.

I have a question.

And it's kind of the most recently passed legislation.

I'm looking at the VACO summary for legislation for transportation.

And as we're talking about, three notch trail, cap trail, things like that.

And I know there's an answer to this because it kind of went right through the General Assembly underneath all these other safety.

But HB 2262, bicycles traffic regulations report,

We do have some concerns with two parts of this.

I don't think any of us are experiencing yet, but this fall when we're going to have two vehicles abreast on rural roads that are single lane, the bicycle also removes limitation on riding, excuse me, removes limitation on riding certain vehicles to abreast and then also to allow bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs.

This was passed on to the

This is patron Hearst's bill and it was passed on to the committees of transportation and the Virginia State Police to look at.

Do you all, Chuck or Lucinda or anyone, have you all had any recent concerns from anyone in this region?

Because all for bicycling, like we just talked about, the Transamerica bike plan that we have rides through this part of the county.

But I think in September, October, when it's cool, we're going to have some anxious bus drivers and vehicle operators when there's two and three vehicles abreast on like, say, Route 53, that's a 55 mile an hour zone.

I can't comment on that checklist, but what I would say is that it might be worth a conversation with David Blount, our legislative leader,

and schools back in session.

And one of our board members is a substitute bus driver.

And he also is the driver's ed teacher.

I'm very for bicycles.

If I think anyone in our county would be, would be me.

But I think that this kind of legislation came through.

What we watched is it originally was too abreast when it was a four lane road and then it became a two lane road and got passed.

When you have a four lane road, when you have a four lane road and you're able to pass in the passing lane, it works.

So I'm just throwing it out to the group and maybe, you know, maybe there was some legislation from, you know, the folks that it was only to be in certain areas.

I don't know.

Doug, I'll tell you, I ride bikes out on the scenic byway we just talked about in several areas.

And in practicality, people are so afraid of the new rule that even when you're single file, they won't pass.

They'll just ride behind you at 15 miles an hour forever.

It doesn't matter if you slow down, wave them past, they're so deathly afraid to not have enough room or to cross all the way over that they, it's actually made it much more dangerous.

And my only other comment is

Sorry, I got on mute.

It is our bicycle lane on 53.

Yeah, and they ride it pretty regularly out of the Lake Monticello area, and they come down when they can go downhill, and they're going like 30 miles an hour, and I mean, God bless her, hit some gravel, but then when they hit the hills,

You know, I'm just, I think that some of this got passed without, you know, there's all those bills that get passed that, oh, they made it through and no one really discussed them in committee and all that kind of stuff.

So I'm just throwing it out for the good of the group.

I'm not saying yay or nay on it.

It was definitely, you know, it was the county, Albemarle County definitely, there was a lot of support for it within the community and basically just hearing how it provides more of awareness, kind of makes drivers look for bikers and yeah, it was,

I think it does help.

We have a lot of rural routes in our areas that we're trying to identify how to accommodate.

We're working with VDOT on signage and maybe some additional shoulders on some paving of roads and stuff.

Does anybody have anything else?

I am interested in subdivision roads.

Probably a good topic.

I mean, I'd be game.

I can share what Greene's done.

We've recently gone through that.

I'll add that to the agenda.

Stephen, I thank you for the excellent presentation today.

And seeing that there are no other members of the public that have joined us, I motion to adjourn the meeting.

Second.

Thank you, everybody.

And we'll see you all next time.

Thanks a lot.