Rural Transportation Advisory Committee Meeting   5/17/2022

Let me read the notice of electronic meeting to start the meeting.

This meeting of the Rural Transportation Advisory Committee is being held pursuant to the Code of Virginia 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings when the locality in which it is located has declared a local state of emergency and the

The nature of the emergency makes it impractical or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location and the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the discharge of its lawful purpose.

duties and responsibilities.

This meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public with closed captioning and there will be an opportunity for public comment during that portion of the agenda.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice at the TJPDC offices to the media website posting an agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

The meeting was held by electronic communication means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

Thank you.

Saying that there's not anybody here from the public,

Does anybody have any comments on the minutes from last meeting?

I see no comments.

I motion to approve the minutes.

Can I get a second?

I'll second.

Thank you.

All right, July meeting.

Yeah, so we're going to go back to in-person meetings.

We will try to have like a hybrid meeting where the public can participate.

Oh, did I put the public can participate via Zoom, but we will need the committee members to be in person.

We did pass a policy, this committee passed policy for members to participate, yeah,

The remote electronic participation policy is in your packet.

So members can participate electronically, I think for two meetings.

And there's specific reasons why they would need to participate, but they don't have to tell everybody the specifics of the thing.

They just have to tell us which it falls under.

So that's kind of a summary of it.

Yeah, I will add that an in-person quorum is still required.

So you can't all decide to participate remotely at the same meeting.

Yet, it sounds like there might be some changes to the General Assembly coming.

I can get my pizza fix again.

I shall.

Alrighty, I will go ahead and share my screen.

First, I just wanted to say thank you all for giving me a few minutes of your time to discuss the strategic plan.

The TJPDC has been working to develop as part of this year's work program.

And thank you to those of you who have already met with us to discuss this and share your insight.

And for those of you who have not met, and just as a refresher for everybody, I'll go into a little bit of the background of the strategic plan and the purpose.

And then we'll go through some of the findings there and give you guys the opportunity to share any feedback.

So I've got highlighted here, the purpose of the strategic plan.

and it's really for the rural transportation program and it's to help the TJPDC further define transportation priorities for each locality and the larger region to establish a framework to develop future work programs and more efficiently utilize the program resources and to further relationship building within the within the PDC.

I want to actually share really quickly in the chat

The online version.

I might have to stop share really quick.

Sorry about that.

Just in case anybody wants to zoom in a little bit closer.

It's right there available for you all.

OK.

Here we go.

OK.

And so the purpose here really is for the TJPDC to be able to refer to this document to help guide the development of the annual work program that helps to define our program and administration priorities for each year.

through rural transportation to help us maintain and manage the annual budget and to determine the focus of applications for grants and special studies, identify special initiatives in the region, and then just serve as a general guide for our program activities.

And then here in the document, I just kind of go into a little bit more detail of the funds that are provided through the rural transportation program

The localities and areas of each of the localities that we serve and really what the main purpose of the program is.

And then when you scroll down a little bit here, you can look into our scope of work and what the process really was for developing this strategic plan.

So first we developed a list of stakeholders, which is really all of you all.

Thank you for being a part of this process.

and then to review the policy related to the transportation program to develop topics and programs of interest to the rural areas for discussion, conduct a survey and stakeholder interviews, and then review our past work programs that the TJPDC has carried out, but then also to look into other areas, annual work programs to gain some insight into best practices there.

And then again, generally to identify opportunities for collaboration,

and then develop the strategic plan.

So here I've got all of you all listed.

And then I'll just share a little bit about our benchmark of the rural work programs.

So here I've just kind of outlined the process, but if you scroll to the bottom, these two charts take you into a little bit more detail of what the fiscal year 2022 rural work program looked like for the Rappahannock-Rapidan, Central Shenandoah, and Central Virginia.

And then I also looked into the TJPDC's past work plans up until

2013 to kind of just get an idea of what our major focuses were over the past few years and our successful projects.

Scrolling back up.

So from there, I was able to find a little bit more information on the typical support that the TJPDC offers and the programs that we're involved in through the transportation program and then some examples of success.

What I found from looking at the other areas of strategic or not strategic plans or annual work programs was that they'll typically be very consistent on a year-to-year basis and break it down from statewide, regional and local planning tasks and just gain feedback from their commission and committee during the draft of their process, similar to what we do here.

There are a few differences I thought was interesting to see in the amount of resources allocated to program administration versus the program activities.

We try to focus a little bit more heavily on the program activities and projects to provide more support to you all.

And then here we're getting into the actual strategic plan.

So,

The vision for our program is to advance transportation projects and initiatives within the region, provide a forum for regional partnerships and coordination, and then maintain the rural transportation plans.

General vision there.

And then based on the conversations that I had with most of you all, as well as a survey that I had sent out to kind of help facilitate and inform this,

I was able to gather information on the strengths and the weaknesses of the program and our meetings and generally the work that we do through rural transportation.

And you can take a look into those a little bit more in depth if you're interested.

Sort of through benchmarking our strengths and weaknesses, we were able to identify a few

Overarching goals and strategies to help us strengthen our strengths and address our weaknesses.

So here I have it broken down based on four large goals and then the intended outcome and then the strategies that we're hoping to implement.

And this isn't broken down on a specific fiscal year basis, but it's more so this is the ideal

that we'd like to be able to implement in the future.

And as we work to develop next year's annual work program, we'll pull in this information to help inform that.

So just generally the first goal is to deepen and sustain the collaboration between transportation stakeholders within and in the surrounding region.

And it's really just to consistently and engage and share ideas to collaborate, not just on the regional level, but also the inter-regional level.

And so here part of what we're trying to do is increase our coordination with the MPOs.

There's a lot of overlap between the regional priorities there and I think things that we can all learn from them.

So it's just to really share pertinent agenda items with you all so that you're aware of those topics and are able to attend those meetings.

If it's pertinent and then additionally with the rural

our regional transit partnership as well to increase coordination there.

And then on an as needed basis to help you all in discussing your local priorities with your board of supervisors and any best practices and the benefits of various rural transportation priorities outside of just paving roads and the general maintenance that we do.

and then to help coordinate inter-regional projects with PDCs outside of the TJPDC and then also to invite speakers from other areas to talk on their best practices and their lessons learned from their projects and initiatives.

And then the next goal is to increase education.

amplifying the messaging on the positive impact of innovative solutions to transportation in the region through social media, et cetera.

And then again, sharing information with local boards so that they understand best practices and then continuing to attend community meetings to increase outreach and coordination on rural transportation priorities.

And then

Goal three, we have to equip our TAC and planning staff for success in addressing rural transportation topics and priorities so that we have each locality has abundant access to tools and resources that support transportation solutions in the communities.

So through part of the research that we've done for this, as I stated before, we had interviews with a lot of you all.

And some of the questions that I had asked was really what are your current transportation priorities?

What's coming down the pipeline?

And what are ways that we can help?

And while that's not delineated here in the strategic plan, we did take note of those things.

And the goal here is to help

to facilitate the development of more specific local projects by keeping an up-to-date list of what are your current priorities, what are your upcoming interests, and then working together throughout the year to develop specific locality projects to include in the annual work program.

Just to make sure that we're up-to-date on

on what really is important to you all in ways that we can best support you and best use the funds.

And the idea here was also to develop a rotation where rather than when we're developing the annual work program to ask anybody for each locality if there's any project that they were interested in facilitating that we would have a year designated to each locality so that

We could work more constructively and collaboratively throughout the year to develop these projects and give everybody the opportunity.

And then finally, to just maintain a sustainable infrastructure for the Rural Transportation Program to implement the Rural Transportation Goals.

So actively sharing information on alternative funding streams and researching those as well.

Assisting localities and identifying priority locations for small area plans, corridor studies, and transportation projects.

Here it's to more collaboratively review transportation plans, including the real transportation plan, but then also smaller efforts so that these planning efforts remain current and useful rather than kind of falling to the wayside.

And then

What I have stated before where we develop a rotation of primary local assistance projects.

And then finally, just go into generally where we're trying to increase our emphasis and the project areas.

And then I'll just show you really quickly in the appendices.

We have some of the feedback that we got from the survey and I'll share the link in the chat here.

For anybody who hasn't yet had the chance to fill it out, it's just about four questions and it only takes about two minutes to fill out, but will help us increase the reporting.

But I just wanted to give you all the opportunity to share any feedback you may have here.

But I will also share the draft with you all.

And if you have any other feedback that you'd like to share with me, you can feel free to send me an email or give me a call before

the 31st of May.

And I'll include that feedback into the final draft.

Thank you.

I'd say something.

Isabella, thank you for that in-depth report.

It's good to see that you've done your work on all that stuff.

Good to see that, you know, very in-depth report.

I had a piece of feedback.

I really liked everything that I saw in the report.

I think all those

Goals and objectives and strategies look really great and I'm excited to get to work on those.

One thing that I would love to see in the report would be the addition of measures.

So concrete and measurable things that could be associated with specific objectives or specific strategies.

So I think once we have those measures, that's gonna make it possible to figure out where are we today.

So if one of the goals is promoting coordination,

having some way to measure, well, how effectively are we coordinating already?

And then a year later, we can take the measure again, and then we can see, did we actually move in the right direction?

And now we can demonstrate that we are coordinating more effectively than we were before.

So I think the addition of measurements is gonna be really important to make sure that these aren't just good intentions, but that we can actually demonstrate, hey, we succeeded at these parts of the plans and advanced in these areas, but we can see here

We didn't advance as much in these areas, or maybe we even slipped behind in these other areas.

So we'll have to focus on that for next year.

That's great feedback.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I hadn't considered that.

Take that into account.

One thing I'll be looking for is I'd like one of the goals to be that RTAC reaches out to other PDCs and MPOs, and perhaps we participate in their meeting.

Absolutely.

That was something that I tried to address, but I think maybe potentially sharing information on

priorities that they have going on that would be helpful.

Yeah, I agree with Tom.

Plan RVA has been, if you follow them on LinkedIn,

They're doing a lot of work right now in what they call Central Virginia, and we're part of Central Virginia.

So basically it'd be wonderful, like Tom said, to, you know, our neighbor to the east is Goochland and, you know, basically Louisa and Hanover and stuff, that kind of region area covers some things.

So it'd be great to maybe this fall, they have a lot of things going on transportation-wise.

So it'd be nice to get a little from them.

Can I ask a question?

What does that look like in terms of this committee's participation?

Because each of you, depending on where you are, are going to have overlapping issues with different other regional bodies.

Like Nelson County would be looking at the Lynchburg District.

You know you guys in Fluvanna and Louisa might be more impacted by Richmond and then you know looking at Greene County and Albemarle you guys would be more impacted by what's happening maybe in Culpeper.

The way I see it is 15 to 30 minutes of every meeting could be given to one of these MPOs or PDCs because as you're saying we have so many of them that really could take the whole year or two years to cycle through them all and at least just touching base with them and I mean there could be someone could reach out to me about or Douglas about solar and transportation or someone could be hey we hear about the bow tie we'd like to learn more about that so without one of us on our own time to go and participate in their meeting

I think it's a two, I'm looking for like a two-way street.

I don't really know if all these PDCs and MPOs might go, we're not interested for all we know.

I think we just got to call, start calling an email and an ask and see where it goes.

Yeah, I'd say the same thing.

Like Western Goochland has a lot of rural transportation things and they're doing a lot of

Obviously a lot of work in Tucko Creek, Short Pump kind of area within Ricoh, but they're like a split county.

They're really, where my wife works halfway down 64, they're doing a lot of work that's rural transportation based, even at the Gum Spring and other exits there.

So transportation elements that are not related to 64 that are related to their region of their rural area,

and the Outer Edge.

So yeah, we've done a lot with Nelson and Lynchburg.

That's great.

We've done some with Culpeper.

I think it's nice to switch up and get information, but keep doing what we're doing in our region.

Don't stop doing that, but add in a flavor of some of the other elements.

Cause sometimes we might find out we're, oh my gosh, like 30 minutes from me, they're doing exactly what I want to do, but I didn't know about it in my PDC.

Thank you.

Just to offer a cynical viewpoint or a different one.

Is there a way to maybe accomplish the same thing by learning what creative and unique things are happening and requesting presentations when we discover that things that would be appropriate as opposed to having a set schedule of shared meetings or

So invite people as needed and project specifically as opposed to having a maybe a set thing.

I think it offers an opportunity for the staffs of the RTACs to work together more efficiently than trying to schedule a monthly or a quarterly presentation back and forth.

I'm fine with that.

This may be just me, but I'm wondering if this is a good place to start.

What localities are in each PDC and MPO and which locality in our PDC that would align closely with?

Like Sandy, you were saying Culpeper might be more appropriate for Greene.

I personally don't even know which groups are together.

You know what I mean?

Like I know who's in the central Virginia one.

So I used to work there.

I know who's in mine, but I think that might be

So yeah, I just popped onto the plan RVA one.

And, you know, they call it the Central Virginia Transportation Authority, and you can go on afterwards and look at it.

But

It does overlap into other areas of PDCs, but the heart of it is Richmond and that capital vicinity area.

I agree with Jim and Tom that we won't do this every time because it takes away from our PDC region.

I think maybe like before and after General Assembly things, when we're not doing General Assembly updates, when we're doing something in the fall or spring, we could have guest speakers or that kind of thing.

We'll do something.

How's that?

All right, well, Chuck, I wanna learn more about bow ties.

Yeah, I have one question.

Did we skip over the July meeting locations?

It's gonna be the same location it used to be before COVID.

Yeah, so it moved from the 19th to the 26th.

And the other question I had, are we going to do a joint meeting?

No, I was just going to say, we were going to talk about that a little bit later to determine if you all were interested in a joint meeting, but we'll talk about that at the end of the meeting.

No, no, I'm fine.

I just saw that we skipped it, and I know we talked about it this morning, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something that was forgotten.

No, thank you.

Too many screens opened here.

Okay, Zion's Crossroads, we're doing a study there now, we're wrapping it up actually, where we looked at the corridor of 15 north through Zion's Crossroads and into Fluvanna and then on 250 east and west from 15.

So let's see, next slide.

So this is the corridor and all the intersections that we looked at as part of the study.

We basically looked at where we can make improvements along the corridor because of all the growth that's occurring.

And we're starting to see some safety problems at a couple of the intersections.

So we work with TJPDC and Fluvanna, Louisa to do this study.

and we looked at what improvements would be needed along the corridor, dress, bike, ped, transit, as well as travel in the future as well as today.

And then we came up with a series of recommendations.

And two of those recommendations are, these are the priority, prioritized recommendations that we came up with.

And we're really gonna focus on the,

These are the two that they submitted for this round of SMART SCALE.

And we're really going to talk about the bow tie intersection, which is just north of 64 at the 15 Spring Creek, Cross Creek intersection.

So the bow tie, these are the crashes that were occurring there.

And that was one of the reasons we looked at this intersection because it's ranked 28th in the district from a crash standpoint, experienced 32 crashes in the last five years.

and 11 of those were injury crashes resulting in 19 injuries.

And like I said, we had a number of rear ends and angle crashes which are predominantly intersection related.

So we're looking at that.

We've got a lot of development occurring and we're starting to see a breakdown of that intersection from a capacity standpoint too.

So we looked at using the alternative intersection tools.

We looked at several alternatives for this intersection

and when you look at the operation, the bow tie seemed to be performing the best.

We did look at no build, the bow ties in the bluish color or the teal blue color.

Green is the quadrant intersection and the blue on the right is a hybrid, which is basically half of

Quadrant, half of a bow tie.

So, and these were, but the bow tie seemed to perform the best out of the four when you look at the travel times overall.

So what is a bow tie?

A bow tie is a, it's basically an intersection that you relocate all of the left turn movements from the intersection through adjacent roundabouts on the side streets.

And then basically the roundabouts can be at four legged or we wouldn't put one at two legged at a single in the middle of the road basically just to accommodate the U-turns.

So generally you would put them at intersections.

So in this case, we're looking at a four legged

intersections for both the roundabouts but basically it relocates those left turn movements which the benefits of it it's the next slide it's going to provide safety improvements or it's going to reduce the number of conflict points at a traditional intersection you've got 32 conflict points 16 of those are are are actual t-bone where you're actually crossing

the paths are crossing and of the bow tie what it does it reduces that number between the main intersection and the two roundabouts down to 28 but it only has four conflicts so you're going from a 16

Severe crossing conflicts to four severe crossing conflicts.

So with that, you're going to see some safety, a lot of safety benefit because you don't have as many conflicts.

It also increases efficiency because basically you're reducing the number of movements at the intersection and the relocated movements are basically yield control for the right turn and for the U-turn at the roundabout.

It also reduces the, by reducing the number of phases at the main intersection.

Traditionally, conventional intersection has eight phases, one for the throughs, left turns.

So it's going to reduce that down to two phases where you're just talking about the through movements for each direction.

So that's going to reduce the number of the stopping that you're going to have, and it's going to reduce the overall delay of the intersection.

This is the bow tie that we've come up with for the concept for this intersection and you can see the two roundabouts.

15 is north-south, the main line.

64 is just to the south off the screen.

You've got Spring Creek to the west and the Loaves, Zions,

Walmart stores and there's also some development that's further to the east and those are all surrounding this intersection.

The blue lines on this represent a shared use path that we're going to add to the concept and we're also going to do an expansion of the park and ride lot for this particular project.

But as you can see is basically this would eliminate the left turns at the main intersection and those would be

routed through the adjacent roundabouts.

All right, so what is a...

And these are the movements.

Okay.

What is, uh, how do the movements work?

Uh, this is, uh, right out of the Innovative Intersection website.

Um, and it shows how the, uh, some of the, how the movements work for some of these locations for northbound 15 or southbound 15.

Basically, if you wanted to go through, you could still continue through as you do today.

Um, same with the right turn.

You could still make the right turn off the main line, but if you want to make the left turn,

As you're coming north on 15, you would have to make a right, make the U-turn at the roundabout at Market Street, and then go back through the intersection westbound to go to Spring Creek.

And that's how the left turns would be handled for the north and south movement.

If you're coming east-west and you want to make a left, you would go through the intersection, make the U-turn at the roundabout, come back and then make the right to go northbound or southbound on Route 15.

The throughs and the rights for the side streets would still be the same.

All right, I'm gonna show you, we have a video that we put together for this project and I was gonna show that real quick.

Let me get to that screen.

The Virginia Department of Transportation, Louisa County, Fluvanna County, and the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission are pleased to present the innovative bow tie configuration at the intersection of US 15, Camp Creek Parkway, and Spring Creek Parkway.

This intersection is just north of the divergent- Can you guys see the screen?

I-64 and US-15 in the Zion Crossroads area and is a critical node for local, regional, and commercial traffic.

Today, the intersection already experiences heavy congestion during peak commute and weekend periods.

As plant development and growth continue, these conditions will only worsen through design year 2040.

The bow tie design will substantially reduce delays and congestion.

At the main intersection, left turns from US-15 are restricted and completed instead by using the adjacent roundabouts to U-turn and traverse US-15 through the traffic signal.

Vehicles on Spring Creek or Camp Creek parkways who wish to make a left turn onto US-15 will first travel straight across US-15, U-turn at the roundabout, and then turn right onto US-15.

All other motorists approaching US 15 who wish to go straight or turn right will proceed as they would at a conventional signal.

Bow ties are designed to accommodate all roadway users, including trucks, pedestrians, and bicyclists.

The proposed bow tie enhances pedestrian connections as compared to existing conditions.

It will also improve freight mobility through the corridor and access to I-64.

Our first example movement is a left turn from US 15 to Spring Creek Parkway.

At a bow tie, this movement is accomplished as follows.

As you approach Spring Creek Parkway on US 15, navigate to the right turn lanes and make a right turn onto Camp Creek Parkway.

Next, make a U-turn through the roundabout.

Lastly, travel straight through the signalized intersection to your destination on Spring Creek Parkway.

Now we'll look at another movement, how to travel south on US 15 from Market Street.

First, make a right turn at the Market Street roundabout.

Then drive straight through the signalized intersection and continue west to the Spring Creek Parkway roundabout.

Complete the U-turn through the roundabout.

and then make a right turn onto US 15 southbound.

A bowtie intersection at this location will provide numerous benefits.

The bowtie improves safety performance for all users by separating and reducing conflict points.

The roundabouts reduce delay, provide comfortable U-turn movements and maintain local access.

The boat also reduces queuing and intersection control delay by as much as 50% as compared to the no-build condition.

VDOT, Fluvanna County, Louisa County, and the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission thank you for your participation.

We look forward to offering you better safety, access, and convenience for all users in Zion Crossroads.

For more information, please contact Charles Proctor at VDOT,

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I have a question.

I remember being really struck when I was going through planning school and people were talking about sort of separated bike lanes or non-separated bike lanes.

Just bike lanes on the side of the road is kind of like the standard we were aiming for.

And

That really doesn't work for most people.

You probably will see young men, young adult men using that kind of infrastructure, but families won't, women often won't.

So it just seems strange to me that that was sort of the target.

And I wanted to get somebody who knew more about this area than I do to weigh in.

The Bowtie was talking about how it's going to serve cyclists and pedestrians.

I think everything's relative, but do you see cyclists and pedestrians out there today?

And if not, is it part of the vision that you really want this to be a place where pedestrian and bicycling are major transportation modes?

Yeah, Stephen, I mean, we're looking at as part of this overall study, we are looking at a shared use path.

We do have a lot of residential on both sides of the road.

And right now there's no way to go from the Spring Creek.

There's no way to get to the shopping center at Walmart or Lowe's or any of the commercial on the other side of 15.

We're actually going to add those facilities in.

We're looking at this intersection right now, but the long-term plan,

And I don't want to speak for the county, but in our study, we were calling for a shared east path along the entire section of 15 corridor from Spring Street to the north, their northern entrance, all the way down to 250.

So you'll be able to not have to get in your car necessarily.

You could bike and walk from those developments to whatever those commercial or office areas that are going to grow in that area in the future.

So I mean we've got to start somewhere and try to plan for it.

This is one of the major intersections where you've got a lot of development and there's no way to cross 15.

So we're going to actually add as part of this project the facilities to cross 15 and cross Spring Creek and Camp Creek so you could actually walk from the park and ride lot over to the

fast food restaurants on the other side of the road.

Right now you can't do that.

Or the hotels on the west side, you can, instead of having to get in your car and drive over there, you can walk across the street.

Right now there's no way to do that.

So until we can get a lot of those, and this is predominant in a lot of the rural areas, you don't have facilities.

So we're looking to add those facilities in as we put projects forward so that we can accommodate

all modes of transportation.

And that was one of the things we heard at the original public meeting.

That sounds like a huge improvement.

That's great.

For Tom and Douglas, have you thought about sort of the long-term game?

Do you have a vision for like, we would like

20% of all trips to the bike pad.

Yeah.

I guess, Stephen, what I would say is what we've been focusing on.

And I'm looking at Bella O'Brien down there and Jon Mickle Whalen in my office.

20 or 30 years from now, we want to have placeholders.

So these things are easy to do.

You may not even be, I mean, I don't mean to sound futuristic, but you might end up touching the surface on the bike path.

You might be in a hydro bike, hydro plane, hovercraft.

And I know we laugh at them.

I mean, it's awesome because right now the delivery drone, drone up services and all that, they're already doing it in certain markets.

So I think the key for us to answer your general question,

It's kind of like overall, if you don't put the, like when I was young,

at Chesterfield, I had a transportation director who liked bike lanes because that was one third of a travel lane he could use for a car.

Okay.

And none of that sounds archaic, but, um, that wasn't his real intent.

He was this, you know, like, Hey, give me the, give me the pavement and the right away and I'll work with what I can.

But, um, that, I guess my point is we want to, we were thankful for Chuck and Sandy for doing a lot of this because the hardest part later on, I think in transportation planning is to

to already establish or get right away.

And with the DDI and the fact that you don't need to widen the bridge on over 64, we're trying to utilize them, but we've had a hard sell for some of our older commissioners and board members.

I'll tell you, I'm in my mid fifties, I'm 54, but it's like,

I'm trying to understand and realize that we need to work on

keeping placeholders or starting off correctly with the plan.

I'm gonna let Tom talk about it because it's mainly his area, but yes, well, the area comes down to the new roundabout we would ultimately share that's being proposed by Louisa.

And for us to get that type of traffic in 20 years coming from a lot of mixed use apartments and other housing types that may not have a car.

So the area between right at the county borders there's a lot of very undeveloped commercial there and there's also an approved plan unit development there and on the side where the bow tie is being proposed the other side of 64 is another planned unit development

Both of those PUDs are required to have a pedestrian sidewalk infrastructure.

They will be groundbreaking that they're having that because right now the only sidewalk infrastructure the county of Louisa has is actually the town of Louisa and the town of Mineral, which are two totally separate governments and those two towns aren't connected together.

So you have sidewalk infrastructure that pretty much peters out as it touches the county

area.

So kind of like Douglas is saying and Chuck is saying, we need to start somewhere.

And I think by establishing a network as future planning developments come forward or even small users, we can tie into that.

Now, one of the challenges we've had is I was not able to require companies to put sidewalks in until February of last year when I got my growth area overlay districts approved by the Board of Supervisors and the board member for Green Springs was instrumental in that.

because reality is in Zahn, my wife complained to me.

She went to get tires on her car one day and she couldn't walk over to Lowe's without playing fogger because there was no sidewalk connection.

So, you know, we just built a checkers out there and even the engineer was like, well, what do you need the sidewalk for?

Well, don't you think somebody want to get their haircut and walk over to your takeout window?

You have a window and sit at your patio.

So it's been a struggle in planning

I'm sorry, did you say there was some infrastructure put in on the diverging diamond to allow bikes and peds to cross 64?

Yeah, we'll have to go back and retrofit that.

Right now, there's not there.

Basically,

The bridges are from when 64 was built back in the 60s.

So it's not, you don't have that infrastructure there.

We retrofitted those bridges for the Divergent Diamond.

At some point, we'll have to widen those bridges.

Right now, there is enough capacity, I think, on them that we could route pedestrians across one of the sides.

but I mean, we have that issue at every one of these types of structures where we have existing bridges that don't really have enough space but have some space whether we can do it or not.

We were showing it as running it across the bridge and if we get a project, we'll have to evaluate it at that time whether we can do it or whether we gonna have to do something separate but our hope is that we can run it across the existing bridge.

And that's what we're showing in our concept plans.

At some point, we're gonna have to replace those bridges anyway.

And then when that happens, we'll basically include those facilities when those bridges need to be replaced.

When I did the original forecast for the DDI, we looked at growth out 20 years, 20, 25 years.

So we're getting close to that capacity limit.

So at some point in time, and that's about the same time the bridges were going to they were looking at the life cycle costs and the bridges may need to be replaced.

So we may be getting closer to that threshold over the next 10 or 15 years.

That's a good, I'm glad Chuck went through that because that's kind of what I was, you know, I'm learning a lot more about that existing bridge, but really, Kevin, for us in the county, I think maybe both counties for Tom and I,

It's a whole lot easier to go as planners to the consultant engineer and the developer and say, hey, it's already in the plan.

We're just asking you to do such and such dedication, rather than us having to put it into a thoroughfare plan next and then maybe the thoroughfare plan doesn't match up with this current.

Gateway Plan, Small Area Plan.

So just kind of building those pieces of the puzzle so that it helps guide us.

Would you mind putting that concept you have for the bow tie back up on the screen so we can see that again?

I'm curious about any infrastructure needs beyond the roundabouts.

Let's imagine if you had an intersection with roundabouts already in place on both sides.

What would it take to convert that to a bow tie?

Almost nothing?

So yeah, this looks, I don't know if Chuck was going to say anything about it, but it looks like

Pretty close.

We're limiting the right-of-way.

If you look at some of the fine red lines on it, it does show some of the right-of-way impacts.

On the west side, there's a lot more right-of-way impacts just because of the configuration of the roads.

Spring Creek has a big ton in it, so we basically had to shift some of the alignments around.

You can see where the existing Woodridge Terraces and there is actually some a future parallel road possibly on the west side that goes north through a piece of property and there's also some development that's occurring in that northwest quadrant.

There's an O'Reilly's that I think is already completed.

There's a 7-Eleven that's under construction the next parcel up south of where the park and ride lot is.

There's a Starbucks.

So, um, so like I said, there's a lot of development has occurred since this aerial photo was taken.

That's already in place.

but there is there are some locations where I know somebody said there's one in Richmond in the Richmond area where there's an intersection it has the parallel or the cross street has roundabouts on both sides of it but it's still a regular intersection it just hadn't been converted to a bow tie but it could be.

The other thing is if you look at what the I know David's going to have a presentation on the R cut there's an intersection

Innovative Intersection called a Michigan that basically uses U-turn movements on the side streets to do the same thing we're doing.

And this just putting roundabouts there instead of U-turns.

I did have one more slide, which I can show you.

And you all see this is the innovative intersection page, the links here on the left.

But basically these are all the different types of innovative intersections and interchanges that there are.

And this is, we have this on our website.

All right, thank you, Chuck.

Good afternoon, everybody.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

So let me know when everybody is able to see my presentation.

Is everybody able to see this OK?

Yes.

Going to go to full screen mode and collapse this.

So today we're going to be talking about the Town of Livingston signalized R-CUT project.

This came out of a project pipeline study that we're currently doing.

And I'm going to get a little bit into project pipeline, what that process has been, and basically what the needs are being addressed through project pipeline.

So this is a brand new VDOT initiative that's basically looking at kind of like the highest tier one or priority one VTRANS needs, both statewide and district level VTRANS needs that are, you know, kind of helped you identify where your safety issues are, where your congestion issues are for SMART SCALE projects and various other programs, but mainly for SMART SCALE.

So basically, we're going to be looking at evaluating projects with a multi-discipline team.

So we have consultants looking at it from one way, VDOT, local governments, we have a team of stakeholders, you know, traffic engineering, planning,

LND within VDOT basically are all included in the stakeholders for this.

And then we look at fundable focus alternatives to address the needs that are identified for each planning study.

So, you know, we're going to be focusing really on those very highest nutrients needs that are going to be priority one needs in our district.

So at the end of that, we submit solutions for funding.

Most typically, this is going to be SMART SCALE programs.

So we have kind of the performance-based planning and programming circle here that basically how each program feeds into the next.

So project pipeline there at the top is basically developing your cost-effective solutions for your priority locations that feeds into SMART SCALE, which is the funding program that prioritizes and scores various projects by district and state.

So you have your district grant and your statewide high priority two different programs there within the SMART SCALE program.

You do your performance review after the end of that.

Basically, then you go back over, you look at your data and your metrics and your key performance indicators.

And from that, you go back into veterans and veterans is typically updated every couple of years, every few years.

So we keep an eye on where the V-Trans needs are shifting and where the new performance issues and safety issues are showing up in V-Trans so that we're effectively addressing all of those needs through the project pipeline.

Currently, in the first round of project pipeline, we're limited to five pipeline studies.

So that's with the first round that may or may not change in future rounds.

But for now, we're basically looking at five different areas.

So for Lynchburg district, what I did is I created this, this lifty little map, and I'm going to go ahead and bring it up.

So basically the first thing we had to do was identify where the priority one unstudied locations are located throughout the Lynchburg district.

So what I did is I created a little map, if it don't come up,

Actually, this one.

So the first map is actually the Interact V-Trans.

This is where you can find your V-Trans needs and basically where your tier one, your priority one, two, three, and four locations.

What I did is I kind of imported those locations and created a little map.

And basically what this map is gonna show when it comes up, here we go, is all the Brown locations or all the different corridor studies, safety studies, star studies, RSAs that we've done throughout the past 10 years, basically, because in SMART SCALE, the shelf life or any kind of planning study with traffic turning movement counts and traffic counts is usually about 10 years.

So I cut it off after 10 years and basically overlap that on top of where the tier one locations are and then we're also the tier two locations because we're actually kind of running out of tier one locations since we have a limited number of miles of tier one in our district.

So this basically honed in where those, in red, where those locations are.

So when I turn off all of those, you can see in red that these are basically all the priority one locations that are kind of left in Lynchburg district that have not been studied in the past 10 years.

I've actually recently taken off the five pipeline studies, so they're not showing up on here anymore as well.

But before project pipeline, basically I had those areas in red,

and it helped us to identify those projects.

So one of the only ones that showed up in the rural part of Lynchburg District that wasn't in the Dambel or Central Virginia MPO TPO boundaries is right in Livingston at Front Street, Callahill Drive and Route 29.

Right here basically the signal.

So this is the only signal between Charlottesville and Lynchburg on Route 29.

So this is going to become a major safety issue and it shows up as a priority one for the districts.

So where are we right now in project pipelines?

So we're coming to the end of it.

We've actually submitted this project.

I'll get into that in SMART SCALE, but that'll come a little bit later, but basically we're right here at the very end in May and August.

So we're looking at basically looking at support for the application.

This looks at all the readiness requirements for a cost estimate, a refined sketch,

and all the environmental impacts and all of the right-of-way impacts, utilities.

So we're kind of in the final process of refining all of those impacts with the project at this location.

And that'll all feed into the SMART SCALE application, which opens up June 1st.

So getting into this location, when we did the study, we looked at current and future conditions and the AM and PM peak hour.

Basically, we looked at vehicles per hour and the delay at the locations.

So the left is going to be the existing and the right is going to be the 2045 future conditions.

So currently, you know, it's all in the green.

It's pretty much all like A, B, a couple of Cs, but the level of service and delay is pretty much pretty reasonable and not any significant delays.

However, looking basically later on the eastbound and westbound approaches, this is going to be the main line.

Not the side roads, but basically right on 29.

So this is going to be some some delay showing up, especially in the PM peak hour.

So that was kind of a concern right there is, you know, with the growth expected out on the corridor that we're going to start to see some, you know, degradation and the delay and level of service.

So one of the big issues here is safety.

The crash analysis showed that there were 26 crashes.

We had a fatal crash out there and 11 injury crashes with a total of 30 injured persons and 14 property damage only over a five year period.

So really it looks like the biggest is angle collisions.

And then, you know, basically going through that, we had five angle collisions that were disregarding a traffic signal.

So kind of digging deeper into that.

And then after the angle collisions, the rear end crashes at that location showed up as 38% of all crashes.

And this location is on the latest PSI list.

It's currently 27th.

So this is just a kind of like a little graphic showing some of the major traffic or crash

severity and type breakdown.

So here we have the crash severity by year and we have the breakdown of type.

So basically looking at angle and rear end crashes that are primary crash types within the intersection.

The fatal angle of crash occurred between a northbound left turning vehicle and a southbound through vehicle.

The angle crashes are primarily due to left turns failing to yield the right-of-way or three traffic along US 29 failing to stop for the red signal indicated in this isolated traffic signal.

So as I said, it's the only signal between Charlottesville and Lynchburg.

It's very rural in nature and there's a sudden speed limit drop to 45 just before the signal.

So it kind of creeps on people if they're not aware that the signal is there, if they're going up to DC.

So this has been a repeat issue is the safety and people failing to see the light, you know, or changing, reducing their speed.

So we had a survey for this.

We had 271 people comment on this survey, which ran from February to March of this year.

You know, most people are residents, about three fourths of the people.

And then, you know, a little bit were people who worked in the area and the rest were visitors to the area.

So, predominantly, as we would expect through the intersection, you know, driving a personal vehicle was by far the most prevalent mode through this intersection.

We had a couple of people that use Spark and Ride and one person who responded, they used Transit.

So here are the public survey results.

So safety definitely showing up very high as the biggest concern for a lot of people.

You can see right here is basically where the number of people ranked this as number one.

So for vehicle safety, you can see a huge number of people basically ranked that as one.

To a lesser extent, traffic congestion was also showing up there.

So that was second.

But for the most part, all the other issues were pretty similar.

You know, traffic congestion, geometry, pedestrian, bicycle safety, access management and transit accommodation.

So here we have the existing condition rating.

30% of the survey takers considered traffic safety condition is poor.

And then after that, traffic congestion and access were considered an average by 68 and 73% of survey takers respectively.

So here's kind of the breakdown.

of those three different condition ratings.

And then for the existing concern ranking, again, crashes, safety is up there at the top, speed limit, travel speed is second, and then followed by truck traffic, congestion, growth, bike, and road condition, and transit.

So future investment, where do people want to see investment made?

Safety is up there at the top and improved traffic operations.

So based on the survey and kind of the existing and future conditions, we've looked at four different options at this location.

There were two different archives that were considered.

The first is an unsignalized restricted crossing u-turn.

Basically, this has safety benefits will get into operates at a level of service C or better during the peak hour.

And then as one of the improvements identified here, the next being the signalized archive, this one had a better operational improvement.

So looking at a level of service B or better in the peak hour, I've highlighted this in red because this is actually the final solution that we went with for this for SMART SCALE.

Alternative two was a new interchange.

This had very high costs and significant right-of-way impacts and total tanks.

And then the final was just a very much more of like an interim solution, not really meant to be a permanent improvement for the area, but it's a lower cost project with minor delay reduction.

compared to no build and minor safety improvement but the issue with this is that the impact would be immediate for reduction and delay but in the long term you're still seeing those C's, D's and F's with the offset left turns and if anybody wants to see the sketches or details on any of the other recommendations just let me know.

So we ended up going looking at alternative 1B.

This is the one the local government and the stakeholders on the project pipeline group really wanted to move forward on because it had a very good improvement on level of service during both peak hours to a B or better.

Significant delay and reduction for US 29 mainline.

Expected safety benefits, you know, it doesn't eliminate the isolated traffic signal, but it does reduce the number of stops compared to the no build from 32 to 16.

So the overall crash reduction would be about 40 to 50%.

So what is the signalized arc?

The signalized arc are typically considered on median divided highways, such as Route 29 through Livingston.

The intersection design where all side street movements begin with the right turn, side street left turn and through vehicles turn right and make a U-turn at a dedicated downstream medium opening.

This also includes a loon for heavy trucks, which I'll show you in the sketch.

Mainline, intersection, and median U-turns can be designed as signalized, stock controlled, or yield controlled.

In this situation, they're going to be signalized.

When signalized, the ARCA provides greater flexibility in traffic, signal, and timing to accommodate unbalanced traffic flow that may result from commuter patterns or retail developments.

So here's how you basically navigate an ARCA.

The Virginia Department of Transportation, VDOT, in its commitment to improving safety and mobility for all road users in Virginia, presents innovative intersections and interchanges.

The restricted crossing U-turn, or R-cut, is one type of innovative intersection.

An R-cut is made up of one main intersection and two median crossover intersections.

All vehicles from a side street start by making a right turn.

To turn left or to go through the intersection, side street vehicles make a U-turn at an adjacent median opening.

R-cuts are designed to accommodate all roadway users, including larger vehicles, such as school buses, emergency vehicles, and trucks, as well as pedestrians and cyclists.

Let's take a closer look at how an R-cut works for motorists.

On the major street, motorists turn left, continue straight, and turn right, just like at a conventional intersection.

From the side street, all motorists start by turning right.

Those who wish to continue straight or make a left turn from the side street will go to the adjacent median opening and make a U-turn.

These motorists will then either continue straight on the main street or turn right onto the side street.

Pedestrians and cyclists can also navigate an arc cut.

Pedestrians use marked crosswalks to safely cross the intersection.

Cyclists can also navigate the intersection using crosswalks and pedestrian paths.

Or if they're more comfortable, cyclists can follow the same paths as vehicles.

There are several benefits of an R-cut design, such as improved safety.

R-cuts reduce the number of points where vehicles cross paths and eliminate the potential for head-on crashes from the side streets.

Increased efficiency.

At an R-cut, each direction of the major street operates independently, which essentially creates two one-way streets.

This means that there are fewer interruptions and more vehicles can move through the same space more efficiently.

Shorter wait times.

R-cuts can decrease the amount of time motorists wait at an intersection.

R-cuts typically operate with fewer traffic signal phases than conventional intersections, resulting in less stopping for mainline vehicles.

To improve the safety and efficiency of Virginia roads, VDOT works with local jurisdictions to find the right intersection type for a location and then tailors the design to its specific needs.

All right, hopefully that showed up for everybody.

So, you know, as the video kind of went through for the side roads, you're basically going to make a ride out, then make a U-turn downstream if you want to make a left.

The reason we're going to go with the signalized R-cut, and I'll get into that in a moment, I think on the next slide, but basically before I get into that, the benefits of the R-cut are going to be

The reduction in number of conflict points where vehicles cross paths.

So this eliminates the potential for head-on collisions.

You can see the number of conflict points in a traditional intersection goes from 32 to 16 for the signalized arc.

So increase efficiency.

Each direction of the major street can operate independently, creating two one way streets and increasing the overall intersection capacity.

So the next thing is going to be shorter wait time.

Fewer vehicles or fewer traffic signal phases means less stopping for arterial vehicles and allowing only right turns from side street vehicles.

So you have 40 percent less travel time and 30 plus 30 percent more vehicles.

So the benefits of the single eyes are good.

This is because we have heavy left turning movements on both side streets that we had to implement the signals at either U-turn turnaround where the loons are.

Because with those heavy movements, we would have experienced queuing at the U-turns.

And this basically improved the delay and the level of service.

So with the unsignalized we're still looking at a level of service of ski with this it goes to a B and basically the the green time at the the conventional intersection location is improved significantly for three traffic so as you can see here the turning movements get 30 seconds and then the the three movements get 90 seconds

So it reduces the overall number of signal phases at the intersection itself and at the turnarounds as well go to a two-phase signal.

So here is the grand review revealed.

This is basically the design that we have proposed at the location.

So this is the overall view.

This shows going to be property impacts as well.

So these are the parcels that will be impacted by the turnarounds.

You know, nothing significant in terms of total takes with this project.

The intersection itself is not going to have many impacts as well.

It's pretty much all within the existing right-of-way.

So that's pretty good at the intersection.

Here are a couple of close-ups.

So the final design details for the primary intersection and the turnaround lanes.

One thing you'll notice is we do not have pedestrian or bicycle accommodation.

This is a couple of reasons we did this because first off it's on a US 29, which is a primary highway.

It's on the corridor of statewide significance.

And basically we do not want to encourage pedestrians crossing at this location just due to the high speeds.

The number of vehicles that go through here daily is a very large amount of vehicles.

So to keep the overall performance, we're recommending looking at other areas for pedestrian improvements once the town of Livingston becomes a UDA.

So there may be other opportunities once the town becomes or the village becomes a UDA.

that they go ahead and look at some other connections that are kind of set away from this intersection.

But for now, just because it's not really showing up as a pedestrian needed the area in V-Trans is because of the nature of the road.

We're just looking at automobile movements through here for them to safely use this intersection and pass through.

So the SMART SCALE application for round five was submitted as a free app.

Currently, it's in district 20B screening.

Full application portal opens June 1st.

Draft scores are going to be released to the public in January of next year, so keep an eye on those.

This project specifically reduces travel time by 40% and accommodates 30% more vehicle, so significant delay reduction.

The project will reduce conflict points from 32 to 16, as mentioned before.

and this is very tentative because this is the consultant estimate that just came out a couple days ago so we need to still do the VDOT review on this but basically it's going to be about 9.6 million and tentatively we're looking at 2031 and 2032 if it were funded through the SMART SCALE program construction for this project.

Thank you.

Who has questions?

I have one question.

And that's knowing that even if you're not providing pedestrian accommodations, there will still be pedestrians who try to cross there, at least until there are other accommodations.

So yeah, I mean, the number of conflict points for automobiles goes down.

Basically, it also gives them a median refuge at a couple of different, a two-stage medium refuge if somebody does decide to cross there.

So the signal isn't going away either.

So it will still be stopping traffic at this location.

So it's not the greatest for pedestrians, and we're not going to be encouraging people to cross at this location.

I'd like to see, as David mentioned, ideally we're going to get Livingston and Ellisport into UDA designation.

And we're also starting our comp plan kickoffs.

There's going to be a lot of studies going on there.

And we've talked about doing small area plans for both areas.

And so one idea I had was an overhead crossing for pedestrians somewhere in that corridor.

Cause like you said, there are people who do cross, I look out my window and all the time.

So the elected officials are very supportive of the project and they've been involved in the project pipeline process.

So they've sat through the presentations as well as our CTB members.

So the elected officials have been involved from the start.

They're very supportive of the project.

Now from the public's perspective, it was a little bit more mixed.

I think because, you know, this is targeted to zip codes in and around Livingston and a lot of people just did not, do not like to see something new, I guess.

And, you know, this may have been a better format for an in-person meeting for something.

You know, so innovative and such a significant change, I think, than what people are used to.

So, you know, we're getting back into in-person public meetings.

I did a couple over the past two weeks, you know, first time.

And I think engaging with people instead of just through MetroQuest where it's really

Not as personal and you can't really show, you know, videos or, you know, you have to click on a link to go to where the videos are, but you can't really show them how to get there through the MetroQuest survey.

So from the public's perspective, you know, people want to see safety improvements there.

I guess they're just not sure like what they would like to see.

So, you know, it's a little bit more mixed in terms of, you know, people either liked it or hated it.

Yeah.

But once you like, you know, Rick, he has like my supervisor, he has like a whole basically portfolio of videos and first testimonials from people locally in Lynchburg District who, you know,

We're kind of like, didn't want to round about initially, but now that they have it, they love it.

And the benefits of, you know, roundabout.

I'll add too that Rick Youngblood's coming to our board meeting in June to go over everything with the board members again.

Like you said, a little bit easier in person to kind of see how it functions.

We've just struggled with selling the R cuts.

I think a lot of people see it as benefiting the throughput on the main line at the expense of the local traffic that's coming off the side roads.

I'd have to say that it's that way across the state we do have a few couple I mean a couple that were funded up in Fauquier County this in round four SMART SCALE but before that we weren't getting any of them funded and we actually had one that was pulled after it was selected for funding

So, but we're getting more buy into it across the district.

I mean, the one that was built in Culpeper that's been used as the sort of like child that example, that one was, wasn't even, it was basically the board of supervisors to come out against the project and voted against it.

And we brought it,

built it, and this was before SMART SCALE, but it was built as a H-SIP project with safety funding.

And now that it's built, they like it.

So it's just a matter of getting them in there and where people can start to drive through them and get experiences.

In a lot of instances, especially on these primary quarters, to get to a lot of places, people are already having to do drive-through and make those U-turn movements to get back to the businesses that are on the quarter that don't have direct access off the main line.

So they just don't understand that they're already doing it.

Hopefully we'll get more of like roundabouts.

Hey David, quick question.

When was this traffic light installed or intersection signalized?

How long ago was that?

10 years ago or something.

No, I mean, it's been there a while.

It's just, if people are kind of going through who have never been through Route 29, I know people have friends in Charlotte that sometimes take 29 to DC, just as like a, you know, a little bit more safe and scenic than taking 81 or 95 up.

I will add, I think the key point even for the detractors because

Everybody hates every new idea, always.

It's just one of the things in life we have to deal with.

It sometimes gets overlooked are the safety improvements.

And those numbers, when you're going from rear-end and broadside crashes to sideswipe and angle crashes and a significant reduction in the total number of crashes,

Well, David, I appreciate it.

That was very informational.

I learned a lot about archives.

Last item I'd like to add to the agenda.

Thanks, Tom.

I just wanted to give a little staff update on the Regional Transit Vision Plan.

Many of you may have noticed I emailed your Board of Supervisors to be on the agenda for June.

The Regional Transit Vision Plan is kind of at a midway point.

We've developed some draft vision and priorities and goals for the community and we'll be presenting those to the Boards of Supervisors in June and then

having public outreach in June and July.

So I just wanted to make sure you guys were all aware and give you a heads up that we will be visiting all of the boards of supervisors and the city council in June to share the draft vision and next steps for the vision plan and gather feedback at those meetings.

I don't know if you have any questions.

You know what, let me explain too.

So the,

The vision plan is like a vision of the transit network.

And then some people are getting that confused with the governance study.

So we are kind of creating the vision.

In the vision plan, the consultants made some assumptions on transit funding because so that they could do a kind of a constrained vision of something that we could, you know, tangibly fund.

They also did unconstrained vision of, you know, kind of broader future projects as well.

So that is kind of the vision plan.

And then the next step would be to do a governance study, which would be to make recommendations on a structure to collect revenue and distribute it for transit funding.

So that would be how we would pay for the vision plan.

And that would, hopefully we're going to

Well, we are going to include the rural counties in the study.

So we'll be coming to your board of supervisors during the governance study, which won't start until next fiscal year, this July, and including the rural counties as part of the study to see if they want to be part of the transit vision.

And so any

The funding that's collected will be used on transit, but it will also be open to other types of roadway projects that support transit.

So pedestrian, bike crossings, intersection updates, things like that.

So I hope that was a clear picture of kind of where we're going with these studies and kind of the steps that we're taking.

I don't know if there's any questions.

Oh, one more thing.

So the Regional Transit Partnership meeting, which is next Thursday at four o'clock, it's the 26th, the consultants will be doing a like kind of big 90 minute presentation to the RTP.

On the plan, I'll be doing a mini one to the Board of Supervisors for your counties.

That meeting is a committee meeting, so it's open to the public, but people could not come and participate asking questions and writing comments at that time.

However, I just wanted you all to be aware of it in case you were interested.

It's going to be the most in-depth presentation about the vision plan so far.

So that's just out there if you want to join us.

No, it's Zoom.

Yeah.

Yeah, we had kind of, we're thinking that we would consider having a joint meeting, but it sounds like it might be better to invite you all to attend either the MPO tech meeting or the policy board meeting in July.

We are gonna have a speaker from the Association of MPOs coming to talk about federal funding opportunities for transportation through the,

Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, IIJA.

So I think it sounds like there are still some action items that you all will need to review at your business meetings.

So it probably makes more sense at that point to invite you to participate and learn more about some of those fundings.

funding opportunities and it could be either one of those meetings will have similar presentations.

But both of those will be in person but will also be available to stream via Zoom.

Oh, okay.

I was hearing it was a joint meeting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just, yeah.

I think Chuck was asking that earlier.

All right.

Well, I'll kick off roundtable.

I'd like to thank the TJPDC for helping Louisa County with the recent open house on the bow tie.

It was very well attended.

We had two meetings.

And right now the county is looking into brushing the dust off of completing the small area plans, which really stopped being worked on as COVID hit back in

2019-2020.

I can go next.

We're kind of pretty much in unison with what Tom said.

We're working on doing our last open house for our comprehensive plan for the spring on June 9th.

And then that'll be our fourth one in the series.

And we have

From the regional housing and Fluvanna housing perspective, we have approved 124 workforce apartments at Colonial Circle.

They're similar to Brookdale Apartments that are in Albemarle County.

It's the same developer.

and then right at right falling right after that at the end of the month we'll be approving the 206 single-family and townhouse units at Colonial Circle.

Stanley Martin Homes will start those construction and infrastructure is going in now but they'll start construction on those most likely after the holidays and

Transportation wise, we're finishing up our own 14 and Commerce Park where it's a 500,000 square foot facility that Chuck assisted us with on the EPR, assisted us with our transportation traffic study information.

So that's real successful going on with the board, should be approving that in the middle of June.

And then our last

We're hoping to find out from the CTV on our Main Street Tap Grant in the middle of June, see if we get that awarded.

I'll go next.

I feel like I've been talking about it for years already, but now that we finally have dates on the books for our comp plan,

Our joint kickoff session with the planning commission and the board is May 31st.

So we'll do a county tour with the consultant and then have our meeting at six o'clock that night and kick things off.

And we'll be doing public engagement in the survey right after throughout the summer.

Also in the fall, VDOT is initiating a refresh of the Route 151 study since it's nearing the end of its lifecycle for SMART SCALE applications.

Already went over

Part of the comp plan update is getting those UDA designations for Livingston and Nellie's board and Rick coming to the June meeting for SMART SCALE applications.

The board adopted the six year road plan last week, had a couple additions.

They were able to prioritize most of them.

And as far as planning, we've got a mobile home park that's been going through planning commission and the board and

It just went to the board and got sent back to the Planning Commission.

When they first applied, it was a 51-site mobile home park.

And by the time it went to the board for the second meeting, it was down to 28 units with some buy-write, stake-built housing.

They had reduced the open area space recommended by the Planning Commission from 35 down to five acres.

So that's going back to the Planning Commission.

It's been very controversial.

The next update is simple.

That's all I got.

I can go.

Tomorrow we'll be doing our public hearing for the secondary six-year plan, talking about unpaved roads and what roads we're going to be paving in the near future.

It was interesting to me if anybody had seen the Piedmont Environmental Coalition's presentation from Loudoun County on how they're preserving their

There are unpaved roads up there.

I was pretty shocked when I delved into it and noticed that up in Loudoun County, they have so many unpaved roads left compared to like Albemarle or at really any of ours, when I would think of our region as being more rural.

So I think in our update to the comprehensive plan, that's going to be something that we're going to be tackling is how to identify

Roads that we want to preserve as unpaid roads.

That comp plan is underway.

The comp plan update is underway right now.

We've got a website.

I think it's AC44.

You can find it on our Albemarle County website, but they have their own separate website for the update to that.

It's got some great information on

on the history of Albemarle County and developing Albemarle County.

So I encourage everybody to take a look at it.

They've put together some really cool story maps that talk about that history of land development on there.

Not much else going on in the rural areas.

Okay, well, I'll preview it.

Maybe you can put the link back in the chat like you did in the last meeting we were in, but we are doing the final public meeting for the 29 North corridor study that the TJPDC led for us along with VDOT and a consultant team, which looked at 29 from Airport Road, so kind of the northern

I think that's really it.

Doug, for Fluvanna County, when you were talking about the potential roundabout or project down there at 250 and 15, it just reminded me that we had submitted the requests for upgrading the functional classification of

We did the same thing, that's what I, yeah, so Kevin, Chuck has all that, Jon-Mikel and I got all that, Chuck was real helpful, and right after you guys finished it, we took it to our board, and so yeah, we've done the same 250 functional classification all the way to 15, and then also the 53 all the way to 15 at the Palmyra roundabout,

So what we're going to do real quick, we're meeting with Candace Perkins and Rebecca Ragsdale first on some, like we were talking about last month, the last session, the homestays, and then

Jay, I'm gonna try to get with you and others in June or July for the gateways into the counties.

And sorry about this for everyone else, but I was just letting Kevin know that, yeah, we're gonna try to get with you guys like mid-summer on our shared gateways.

Yeah, I'm actually, I think I'm in that meeting.

I was invited to that one.

And I thought we were going to talk about gateways in that as well.

Yeah.

So I know Jim just went through some of that, but yeah, so the main reason why I had to get with all of you all at Albemarle is the, I'm trying to be polite, mercy Lago properties, which is NIDA reserve.

and then there's a barn in the county in Fluvanna called Water's Edge, but most people think it's Albemarle.

So yeah, we were gonna talk to you guys about that, but the main focus was homestays and gateways.

Yeah, I was going to try to also briefly talk to Candice about TDR stuff because my rural preservation group, she probably did a lot in Frederick and that Winchester area, but that's going to be parked well into the future because we got to create our receiving areas first, which will take 10 years or more, so yep.

That's fine.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

We've had a discussion here in the Rural Tech Committee about homestays a little while ago, a few months back.

And then, of course, also, the other thing I will point out is I think Dylan is aware of this is we did submit that RAISE grant.

for the three notch trail, which actually has a small section up there in Nelson County.

The proposal is to build a shared use path that goes from the existing Crozet tunnel all the way down through Albemarle County, through Crozet, and to Charlottesville.

So that was a $2 million application that we've made for raise funds for that.

Looking forward to hearing how that goes.

I can go.

Mostly a lot of thank yous.

We're moving quickly in our comp plan.

We had a change on our

Planning Commission that is a group now that's more interested in achieving the goal of completing the plan as opposed to reviewing it.

So we originally completed zero chapters in a year and a half, and now we've completed

Nine draft chapters in the first quarter of this year.

So it's been delightful.

And tomorrow night, Ian from the PDC is presenting some recommendations for our housing chapter and the regional housing plan in the Greene County specific part of it.

So I want to thank the TJPDC for their participation.

Also, as Kevin mentioned,

Greene County is part of the Route 29 study, the corridor study with some recommendations in Greene and just wanted to thank again everybody that's worked so hard on it on a PDC staff.

Appreciate all the hard work and we look forward to that public debutant ball for that.

Should be interesting.

And I want to thank Chuck as I'm sure he's worked closely with many of you also on SMART SCALE and seems to have done maybe half the SMART SCALE planning in the state.

We're pretty busy working on all those projects and we appreciate his hard work.

Other big things that have been in the news, tangently related, you may have seen that Greene County's

Dispute with the Regional Water Authority seems to be coming to an end.

Each county involved in that has voted to release Greene County from the Water Authority and has requested that their board members on the RSA board vote to immediately have Greene out of that authority.

So that'll be a long transition, but it will be nice to be able to have a little more control over our destiny.

The relationship never really worked very well between Greene and that authority.

And then lastly, Greene also did make an application for the RAISE grant.

And in Greene, it was a combination.

It was a recreational path to some degree.

from the South River Falls, which is just to the west of the town of Stanisville.

So pathway to get from there to the town of Stanisville, which would be mostly recreational.

And then the rest of it was really more pedestrian oriented, multimodal transportation.

So to connect the town of Stanisville to the Ruckersville development area, 29 and 33,

and then to connect from the Rutgersville development area down to the next UDA area which is what we call midway around the sheets and food line if anybody's familiar with that and connecting all of that growth in the south part of Greene together and create opportunities for people to walk and hopefully also significantly improve pedestrian safety because we have a lot of shopping

and a lot of housing.

In many cases, the housings on the opposite side of the highway is the shopping.

And we've had actually three pedestrians killed in Greene County trying to cross the road.

So we're pretty excited.

Hopefully we get a good review.

If not, we learn how to do it better next time.

And that's pretty much summary.

Thank you.

I have one more thing that's not transportation related very quickly.

I'm recertifying for my floodplain manager and I need four more credits.

I cannot find them anywhere.

So if you guys see any related floodwater sort of trainings or webinars or anything like that, I would really appreciate if you could send them on.

Hey Dylan, we just went through last week with FEMA, Albemarle County, Scottsville and Fluvanna are ramp map update stuff and they sent a, they email blasted out a whole bunch of resources and there may be some credit stuff on there so I'll forward that to you.

after this meeting because it might also, I think they're making their way around the region to get everyone to, like our maps are 2008 and these are all the D firms and everything coming out.

Doug, just as a heads up, we just went through that and

The base regulations are quite a bit more detailed and take your time to go through those.

The initial presentation we got through the model ordinance that the state had was missing certain requirements.

So even though we followed it to a T, we had to resubmit it three more times.

And then because of the quality

Of the mapping, we had, I think it was 800 structures that joined the floodplain because it grew so much.

It was a good thing, but be prepared.

Feel free to call if you have any questions.

Right.

Okay, thanks.

All righty.

There's nobody here from the public who are here.

So if there's no other last minute item, I motion to close the meeting.

So for the next meeting in July, we have Bella's going to do a kind of presentation on the bike ped inventory for the rural towns.

And Lucinda, I don't know if we'll have time.

You said we're gonna cover the federal programs as well at some point because there are a couple of new grant programs that have come out, Safe Streets for All and Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program.

So I don't know if we have time to discuss that at the next meeting.

Those will probably be covered at the MPO meetings with those.

We are, the PDC is following both of those programs though.

So we may be reaching out on one or both.

I think, I don't know, David, you might be able to correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the reconnecting communities might make a little bit more sense for localities to look into individually versus as a regional body.

But I saw that you submitted or that you sent that information out.

So yeah.

without knowing anything about it.

I don't know if that's the case.

So yeah, if you click that link, you can read the program details in there, but basically it's looking at kind of repairing the barriers that, you know, divided communities either through the interstate or expressway programs, you know, basically providing technical assistance and

I'm going to, it's in the webinar and I've basically been kept in the loop on that.

And I can also speak a little bit about Safe Streets for All as well, because I know local governments can also apply, but that is predominantly MPO as well.

Okay, thanks.

Hey, one other thing I just wanted to remind everyone.

I was looking at my calendar for AICP credits or different things.

Monday, May 23rd, there's a project pipeline.

I think it's the Office of, what's it, the V-Trans Group.

But if you want to look that up, that one looked pretty interesting.

I can't attend it, but Jon-Mikel and our office can attend it.

But I can forward that to the folks.

But that's Monday.

May 23rd at noon, I believe.

Thank you.

All right, everybody.

I'll see you in July.