Rural Transportation Advisory Committee Meeting   5/5/2026

After we do, or when we do introductions, we can ask their reasoning for participating virtually, and then as a group here, approve it, and if they do, then they can then vote on everything that's moving forward.

Sure, I'll go.

Yeah, sorry I couldn't be there in person today.

I was going to be traveling today, but then I had a family member come down to build.

Me as well, Albier Karina-Plun, Mar County.

I was going to come in, but I didn't feel very good about 25 minutes ago.

So I just wanted to kind of stay in my office and just kind of

We appreciate both of you social distancing yourself from us and this beautiful day.

So thank you.

Todd, welcome.

Yes, I can.

Thank you.

Sorry I'm late.

Excellent.

All right.

So we'll use your reasoning as you are stuck in the meeting.

All right.

We have.

So we can move on to in-person introductions.

I guess I can start.

Berringer Gjorgjievski with the TJPDC and Charlottesville, Albemarle NPO.

I'm a regional planner here at the PTC.

I'm supporting transportation.

I make a motion that we accept the people who are online.

I second the motion.

All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed, like signed.

Can I introduce yourself?

Oh, sure.

Hello, everyone.

That's as far as I'm concerned.

Hi.

I'm David Blount.

I'm the director of the City Services Agency.

Hi.

Are we new here?

Thank you everybody for coming in.

Do we have anybody from, do we have anybody from the public, anybody from the public who would like to speak for three minutes?

All right, waiting for that day to record.

Moving on, we are, we've got like two minutes.

Has everybody had a chance to review the minutes from February 13th?

Do we have any comments, changes in the name?

And I have a motion to approve.

Those approved in the minutes as written.

Do I get a second?

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion passes.

Do we have minutes?

Oh yes, we must properly answer and access things.

Although I will point out once again that VDOT's newsletter is called the Pipeline, not the Roadway.

It's called smart care.

So Robby, do you want to come up to the podium or I can invite whoever slides in for you.

Alright, so just as background, I've been beat up for almost 39 years.

I've been, I was the first district plaintiff for Culver district

I was a district traffic engineer in Salem District.

I've been in the planning section up in Northern Virginia.

Spent some time in project financing and that kind of stuff.

Used to be secondary roads division, then became local assistance division.

And then I've been in the land use area since then.

That's in for maintenance division, planning division, and arguable office staff.

So, some hassle in my background.

I first got involved in access management back in, like, two hundred and eighteen months.

The image there was rolling out some new training and, you know, Virginia was one of the test cases and they did the training and one of the lucky people that got signed up for it and it was all access management and how it can be done to, you know, cut crashes and that sort of stuff.

So, often honored and been involved in that since.

We're a good number of viewers.

All right, so what is access management?

It's location, spacing, and design of entrances, street connections, median openings, traffic signals, interchanges, all that kind of stuff.

It's where people can get on and get off the road essentially or go in a different direction.

Why do we need it?

Well, we need it because most crashes occur at intersections and entrances.

That's where the crashes occur.

So we need to look at it and figure out a way to try to cut them down.

So I'm going to kind of lay out some of the basic principles of access management.

So one of them is that you apply it based upon the function of the roadway.

So high functional roadways and interstates, you're not having any access points other than interchanges.

So broadly spaced,

all the way down to local streets and cul-de-sacs where you've got a driveway to be 25 feet and people expect to stop and slow down and just move slowly.

That's basically what it's designed for.

The other principle or one of the other principles is conflict points.

So conflict points is where two vehicles can cross, merge, diverge, break and stop

Things where there's an opportunity for people to crash into other people.

These are bad things.

The more confidence you have, the more complicated the driving situation that the driver has to face.

So when you're going down the road, you know, it's easy if you're just going down the road and you have just one thing to look at, maybe look at, one thing to look at.

You can put your attention to it, it's hard to get surprised.

But when you have a situation,

like the four-way intersection there.

Okay?

32 conflict points.

So that is 32 opportunities for someone to hit or somebody else.

And that's not even counting pedestrians and bicyclists.

That's vehicle to vehicle.

Okay?

You can do conflict points with those too, those other models.

It makes the situation 100 times worse.

So, the other thing is,

So you want to reduce conflict bets, number one.

Number two, or separate conflict bets.

We get back to the whole dealing with one issue at a time.

So you can put your attention to it.

Another one, I've been to the slide, but it's kind of implied.

It's a lot better to have a merge diverge rather than a crossing because the speed differential in the crossing

Merge to Verge, maybe 10 mile an hour differential.

So the chances of injury are much less, you know, you're dealing with property only damage kind of accidents and that sort of thing.

So, confidence.

All right, so remember I said a lot of crashes occur at intersections.

Well, for entrances, 74% of those crashes occur due to left turns.

So that's another thing to sort of keep in mind.

One of the principles is we like writing right out versus left turns if at all possible.

We like to use mediums to prevent those left turns.

Entrance islands sometimes work, sometimes don't.

Depends on the design.

It depends on how many four-wheel drive jacks on vehicles people have so they can just ignore them.

Reducing speed differentiation.

That's that merge to merge thing.

Those are better than the other kinds of crashes.

Reducing stream differential means basically if you've got a guy stopping the road and it's a 55 mile an hour roadway, the person that was behind him doesn't see him and crashes into him, that's a 55 mile an hour crash.

If you have a turn lane and, okay, how many of you have read the AASHTO Green Book?

It's the big national manual for road design, okay?

Yeah, there you go.

In it, they lay out sort of like the basics of road design, the theories behind it and all that sort of stuff, and what everyone has to meet in the events.

So in that one, for the design of turn lanes, the assumption is that you're willing to make do with a 10 mile per hour speed differential in your car.

So turn is supposed to be designed so that you're braking before you go to do your turn to the turn lane,

you're only dropping down to about 10 miles per hour and then you head over into the turn lane then you're out of the way so that if there is a crash we're talking low-speed departure.

So anyway, we're leaving the crossing onto early lanes, that's turn lanes, forward acceleration lanes, you know the interstate always got that acceleration lane you want to get on.

Now moving on to the regulations.

So that's the basics.

That's the basic principles of access management and how you sort of look at it.

So now regulations.

Back in, shoot, what year was it?

It was somewhere around 2008, might have been 2007.

The General Assembly said, hey, VDOT, you guys need to create access management standards and associated regulations.

and apply those across the state because we're having too many crashes.

We're having to redo roads too often in terms of construction.

So we want to sort of hold that back as much as possible.

So number one, we created those regulations.

It's 24 BAC 30 73.

73 is a chapter number and it has section numbers just like a lot of other regulations.

And the design standards first went into two dependencies in the road design manual because we were applying it first as for principal arterials, so it was important.

And then we were kind of like, and then we were going to apply it to other kinds of streets.

And so we'll have two things in the road design manual.

We finally figured out that that was a really dumb idea.

I don't know what you're thinking.

So we just combined it all and said, okay, just everything, here it is.

So road design manual, appendix F, that has all the standards, the spacings, all that stuff that we need.

With the design, the regulations only apply to state highways.

So state maintained highways.

So the streets inside Charlottesville, guess what?

Regulations don't apply.

Albemarle County, guess what?

Somebody said, they do apply.

They do apply, exactly, because the United takes those roads.

Arlington and Rainier County, they have their own local road system, so they don't want to fly to those.

But guess what?

They fly to the primaries inside those counties, which makes things really interesting, because then it's like, OK, wait a minute.

So we've got roads connected to the primary, but the side roads not ours.

But then we have a connection to that side where it's too close to them.

So we have to work those things out each time.

It's the same thing for about 29 when it passes through to Charlottesville?

So, I'm trying to remember.

You know, it has been 37 years.

I don't remember whether VDOT maintains 29 on the old bypass.

I mean, MxG Business is making that study.

But I do think it's making it from a destruction or something.

I'm actually not sure.

We're not sure either.

So, I'm thinking when I go back in my brain, as far back and reach in, I don't think EDOT maintains the old section of the bypass that's sort of like

from Pantops over into where 29 hits it.

And that part is city, but I think the rest of it going the other way as we've got it.

Okay.

Got that.

All right.

So, basics and regulations.

What we're trying to do is we're trying to get the fewest number of entrances to reduce the number of conflict points.

Obviously, more entrances means more conflict points.

One thing I want to point out on that, that's just as useful for pedestrians as it is, and bicycles as it is for trucks.

Because in those situations, when a pedestrian is walking by, they don't know we're camping clearly all the time.

That's like those parking lots that say, we specialize in foreign domestic.

Well, would you not specialize in them?

You can't specialize in everything.

Just like you can't be 100% aware all the time.

So when you have fewer entrances, it's fewer opportunities to be able to get hit from some locations.

We want to focus the entrances on the side streets because those streets are going to be lower speed, lower classification generally speaking, so less interruption on the main lines.

We like to emphasize write-in-write-out entrances.

Once again, let's sort of note where those sort of crashes occur, so write-in-write-out is better.

Cross Parcel Access.

If you're not even getting out onto the road, that is better.

Demonstrate safety.

So as part of the regulation, someone who's asking for a permit to do an entrance, they have to demonstrate, or VDOT can ask them to demonstrate, Matt can ask them to demonstrate that their entrance is going to be safe.

It's not going to, it's going to minimize the impact on the roadway.

And then mitigate the impacts on highway operation safety.

I address that a little bit later so keep that one sort of in the back of your mind as we move on.

Alternates.

Entrance standards established by localities that are stricter than those of VDOT shall govern.

So if Albemarle County decides that they want to have, you know, 700 foot spacing on every road, well then that's what it is.

I must get your exceptions and wait for tonight.

The other thing is, sometimes localities have a different functional classification than VDOT.

But if their functional classification is for a roadways segment that's higher than VDOT's, then that would govern in terms of what kind of design would be.

And then VDOT-approved access management quarter plans govern if they show the location of entrances and that kind of stuff.

So the standards are designed sort of as for the average situation.

You don't know where it's going to be applied instead of the design statement.

If we do a quarter plan, access management plan, locality adopts it, everyone has worked on it, they figured out what all the entrance is supposed to be.

We've done it specifically for that area.

That is going to be sort of override what the normal status would normally be.

All right, entrance types.

So in law, we have two.

In the regulations, we have three.

And then the design standards, we have four.

I'll get to that.

So for law, we have private drives and we have commercial drives.

In the regulations, we also added low volume commercial.

That was actually required by another law that was passed later and later after.

So private entrances are for up to two dwellings or some sort of utility use, you know, like a cell tower or a pumping station or something like that, something that doesn't get a lot of traffic, but it needs an entrance so people can get stuck in there.

They require best possible site distance and space and standards don't require.

So it doesn't matter how close it is to another entrance, it's okay.

Low-volume commercial entrances are for up to five residences, or land uses that generate up to 50% air.

The greatest example is five residences.

This residential is about 10 trips a day, so that's how that works out.

It has the same requirements as a private entrance in terms of the design.

It doesn't have any requirements for spacing from other entrances, but

private entrances with best possible site distance.

These already have to get at least intersection or stopping site distance.

Generally, it's going to be stopping site distance because that's the lower one usually, but there are certain conditions where intersection could actually be lower than stopping.

So we just don't have either whichever one's lower.

Commercial entrances, that's everything else.

Yay team.

You have to have intersection site distance.

All the design standards apply.

And those are the ones where math can say, you need to show me how this entrance is going to work.

How it's not going to impact traffic, how it's going to be safe.

All right, for existing entrances, just because you have an entrance doesn't mean it gets to stay forever, necessarily.

If it's found to be unsafe, in other words, we permit an entrance,

It's gone in, and all of a sudden we're just having crashes there.

Well, somebody messed up in terms of the design, so we're going to have to tell you, hey, you're going to need to do something.

Does it generate more traffic?

Has something happened with the site that it now generates more traffic?

And even though we've been at the cottage or a development business or anything like that, it's just, it's become a mess.

Yes, we can tell you, you have to do something different.

Is the site redeveloping, rezoning, a special use permit, anything like that?

We can have you look at it.

Is it subject to a new site plan or subdivision plot?

Big look at it.

And then as that's happening, we can say, hey, you know, there's been a sidewalk that's been expanded next to you and you're gonna have to connect to that sidewalk as part of your development process.

What we cannot walk, and this is,

People misunderstand this in different ways, so I'm gonna make the statement, then I'm gonna come back in this one.

So we cannot acquire off-site improvements.

Okay?

But then there's the cabinets.

Except in cases where that off-site improvement is necessary for building the thing that's needed for your entrance.

So in other words, left terminals, it's a perfect example.

If your entrance requires a left turn limit, you need to widen it in a lot of cases.

Well, that widening can only be done at a certain rate.

And those terminates, the widening board, before you can get to the turn limit, could be 1,200 feet.

Not a lot of properties at 1,200 feet of frontage outside of even

Where there are entrances and stuff, okay?

So, yes, we can make you do the terminal lane and the widening associated with that terminal lane, but it's only because of that terminal.

It's not something for, you know, oh, the next intersection, you have to improve that, that kind of stuff.

It's one that kind of thing.

Can I ask a question?

Do you have a question at the end?

If you're going back and saying a site is generating more traffic than you expected and you want to

There's a statute of limitations on it, right?

Anytime.

All land use permits that are issued, and not accepted, VDOT can cancel.

At any point, without?

Well, it's not without.

We're not being arbitrary or capricious.

Sure.

But if you have a business that explodes, hypothetically, no locations specific in mind, that just

Can you require, like, hurling improvements at that point?

You could.

But now here's the thing.

Okay, this is the theory.

This is the theory.

Yeah.

Okay.

The practice is that person then calls up a delegate, whoever,

and says, hey, do you know what VDOT's making me do?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that doesn't get calls of your, calls of your district administrator, my district administrator, Shawn, calls up Shawn.

And Shawn is like, show me those plans.

No, no, we're not doing this.

Or he'll say, well, yeah, it's actually also a problem.

working on dishes and accidentally dropped the blade and canceled the entrance.

That has happened, but as I said, back in the old days.

Nowadays, it's where much gender kind of would be done.

So it would be more of a we're working with you in the county, we try to get some improvements here and that kind of stuff.

But theoretically, we can put barriers up and block the entrance.

That doesn't happen often.

I think I can remember it happening twice.

Thank you for answering my question.

Maybe another follow up on the same topic.

So if VDOT is requiring changes or updates for an entrance, is that

Okay.

Property owner, or business that's there, or what kind of deal, you know, and VDOT has to repay the area anyway, so maybe even some of the work.

I'm not getting into stuff that's kind of in the gray area because we can't count them.

So generally the communication is

The other option is because Ride In Ride Out is the safest, right?

We already discussed that.

VDOT comes in, you know those little flexi poses.

We put those up on the double yellow line in front of your business.

And now all your entrances are Ride In Ride Out.

There's different ways to do this.

I prefer a cooperative approach.

We, working with the business, working with the county, we're all on the same page.

We all want the same thing, which is we do want economic progress, and we do want safe.

So we can do something that achieves those things.

Does that cover the question?

Yes, thank you.

All right, site technology, joining partners.

So unless required to accommodate entrance improvements, yeah, okay, I would be covered with that.

Next one, all right.

So the exponential spacing requirements.

So once again, department versus locally maintained.

Maybe it may not happen.

Except a locality could adopt VDOT's design standards.

Two things.

There's AASHTO, the Green Book.

I mentioned that already.

Okay, and then there's the road design name.

The road design name makes a lot of references to the Green Book.

It pulls a lot of information out of the Green Book, but it sometimes requires things up and above and beyond what the Green Book requires.

Local governments are only required in the Green Book.

For now, NAC though, there's other stuff, but let's just say that the Green Book

But they can always choose, say, no, we're also adopting road design manuals, so there is a new assignment.

So that's an option from there.

But once again, the regulations can cover that, but maybe the design.

All right, yes, okay.

Functional classification, remember it applies based on functional classification.

If your road is classified as a local road, there actually is no entrance spacing requirement.

There is an intersection requirement where you have to have 150 feet between intersections.

But, you know, based on the design standard with the particular kind of measurements you're doing, there's a little spacing built-in radius needed now, but other than that, there's a building standard.

Or once again, an area approved, covered by an approved corridor plan that could affect spacing.

All right, so in terms of spacing sections,

We want to address those as early as stage as possible.

Developer comes in and says, hey, I don't even want to do a rezoning, and I don't want this, this, and this, and I'm planning on doing these things.

We want to address that space immediately.

Because we don't want it to get so far down the line.

We have this wonderful layout put in there, and he's got beautiful trees that he's preserved, and he's got all this stuff out.

And then it turns out that he can't get his entrances where he wants them.

We want to address it as per the legal process possibly.

Then it goes double for traffic signals.

Okay, so how many of you think that traffic signals traffic signals stop crashes?

Nobody?

Sorry, I come to head.

Yeah, yeah.

It was the seed presentation.

In some cases, yes.

Traffic signals also cause more crashes.

It's just the type of crash that's caused.

In a traffic signal situation, most of your crashes beforehand will probably be left-turning vehicles that are essentially in entrances.

Sometimes there's more, sometimes there's usually less, but signals don't stop crashes.

They just shift with the kind of crash and usually reduce it, but not in that entire algorithm thing.

All right.

Okay, the earliest stage possible.

Engage stakeholders, developer, engineer, locality.

Notice engineers look different than developers.

because sometimes the developer says, hey, you consult, go ahead and design it, and they start, and then they don't communicate back and forth, and then you guys tell them something, you tell them something else to the developer.

Okay, so we want all the people at the site discussing things, being upfront.

We need to consider the big picture.

In other words, is there future development along this corridor?

Are there future phases in this development?

Quarter growth?

and then we can require a study to identify safety and operational impacts, excuse me, that can require one as part of the expansion request that comes into being.

And I didn't include here, I said the same pedestrians because they are travelers on the highway.

So a safety event on that is a safety event.

Sometimes you can forget that.

I'm hoping we're beyond that point now, but you know,

All right, so entrance types.

Remember I said linear design, we have a fourth type of entrance.

So we've got commercial entrances, then we have moderate volume commercial entrances.

That's when it's not driven by law and regulation.

That's sort of an in-between on the entrance design.

Then we have low volume commercial and we have private entrances.

This table's sort of a summary.

It says what kind of site distance you need, whether access for entrance facing applies,

and what kind of permit you need to get to get that kind of entrance.

All right.

And here are the dreaded space of standards.

Everyone loves these, don't they?

So regarding these standards.

So the spacing between symbolized intersections is based on some fraction of a mile.

spacing for un-signalized intersections and like three-way intersections with signal and all that kind of stuff.

Once again, that's also a fraction of a mile.

Spacing for full access entrances, and full access entrance means a team, essentially, because you've got a flat wave that comes out and goes in the way.

That is intersection site distance based.

And then finally, the right-in, right-outs, that is five-way site distance based.

critical factors.

There is nothing magical about any of these businesses.

We just have to have some basis for them.

That's what we used.

That said, we have had our research council several studies on our spacing standards over the years.

So we've developed this.

We're working with the research council when we developed it.

Then a few years later, we said, hey, can you guys look at it and see what kind of crashes we're getting?

Are we getting like too many people asking for exceptions?

All that kind of stuff.

They did a study, showed that we could do some adjustments.

We did some adjustments to them.

Then a few years after that, we did another study, you know, hey, are we doing okay?

They did that.

Then we did another study because we had somebody in the research, not the research council, but one of the T-PRAT members,

who initially did not believe that spacing was an issue.

All these studies, they didn't take into account the volumes and blah, blah, blah.

They said, okay, great.

Well, let's do a study.

Let's show them.

So it was the Rob Rob study.

And we had a team out of the open evening, I think, doing the study, all that stuff.

and they looked at the standards, they compared to intersections in their area and the crash rates and all that sort of stuff and guess what?

They found yes, they submitted a vector.

Surprised, surprised.

And their standards were actually pretty reasonable in terms of being that sort of sweet spot of not too restrictive but not so close that it increased the chances of crashes and stuff.

You know, pretty good.

So I feel good about the standards in terms of a rough overall number.

But once again, we do have a process for different sections is there about 20%, 10 to 20% of entrances you need them.

That sounds like a decent number.

Can I put out one thing I see here?

Mostly for the TJPDC folks, but some of the rest of you.

I'll also mention the Highway Classification System, like the standards based on the Highway Classification System.

And sort of just to point out, the spacing for

Chatting Signals.

A lot of that work was done based upon numbers out of Tikai TV or NCHRP.

Well, there was a study done many years ago.

It was led by Gary Stofalo who uses U.S. management for VOT.

And it was an evaluation of, okay, what kind of speeds can you expect, progression speeds can we expect when signals are spaced different, that's about it.

So that's why the standard is based upon also on speed because we're trying to get to that, then we have to have a spacing that sort of accommodates things.

Of course, since then, yeah, I left that page, but I'm still gonna keep talking about it.

Since then, other people have done studies and they said, no, no, no, that table's not right.

And it's actually, you want certain spacing,

there are different kinds of speeds and you have to do a bunch of modeling and that kind of stuff which is why Matt can ask for stuff to show that things work when people want to put something different.

All right.

All right.

Other kinds of spacing requirements.

So that first table that was access spacing.

All right.

But there's other kinds of spacing.

There's the functional area of intersection.

The regulations say you can't have access in the functional area of the intersection.

Well, what does that mean?

Well, that is the part of the intersection where as you're approaching it, you realize there's an intersection there, you put your foot on the brake, or you prepare to maneuver in some ways, and then you stack up if there's a traffic light, you know, and the length of that queue, and all that kind of stuff.

So that impacts the functional area of the intersection.

Yes, we're not supposed to have them, but we give exceptions, so there's a way to stick within it.

On the layman's side, if you're within the turn lane area for that intersection and the taper for that, and maybe a hundred feet past that, that's probably what you're talking about.

It varies, depends on the speed of movement, bunch of other stuff.

Now, downstream impact.

The downstream area does have a functional area of intersection that there's a distance.

The problem is we don't have the

So we actually have a study going on at the Research Council to come up with what would be a good measure for that and the pattern that we can calculate.

All right, so, functionally research, got it.

All right, corner clearance.

So corner clearance.

Shoot.

You know, all the places that I used to go to around here are probably closed about or have changed so significantly that I can't use them as an example.

All right, so you know how some businesses, when you pull into the entrance, you have to stop immediately, and then the person behind you has to stop, and then people kind of back out into the road, because the person in front of you has decided they need to park right here, and it's taking them a while to maneuver the car and that kind of stuff.

Okay, well that's the interest of the church, because when the cars are backed up out into the main line, that's an opportunity to board aid,

Crash.

Don't like crashes.

Chicken row.

I was ready to say that.

I immediately came to my mom.

There you go.

All right.

All that clearance is in a situation, but it's on boilers.

It's not like it's just an entrance like that.

So when someone puts a side entrance in too close to the intersection on the side street, number one, when you're looking,

You think you're clear to start pointing out and then something whips around the corner.

You didn't see them because they weren't on your street at that time.

Now you have a crash.

Also, queuing up from a traffic light with a stop sign and lock and then you've got things all tangled up.

So, corner clearance is trying to prevent that sort of situation.

The one I mentioned earlier, throat length, there it goes, there it goes as mentioned here, but this is not the example, but I'll talk about it I guess since it's already mentioned on the slide.

is that length of when you have an entrance, how far does it have to go so that there's a reasonable amount of space so that people don't end up turning and stopping immediately and trying to decide what they want to do.

It's sort of like a clear entrance.

And that's another one of the next things you're going to emphasize today.

All right.

So local street spacing, remember I mentioned local streets don't actually have a spacing requirement.

There is sort of one, like I said, it's no commercial, I'm just going to go down, okay.

So local street spacing, 50 feet between entrance route.

So it gives a short segment there, and then people don't have to worry about running into something.

Also, you mentioned roundabouts.

You don't want entrances too close to roundabouts, because remember, when a person's entering a roundabout, their attention is supposed to be on the circulating roadway,

Who's coming?

Can I pull out?

Can I not?

Do I have to stop?

All that kind of stuff.

We don't want you having to worry about somebody pulling out here or there.

So 115 feet from the outer edge is the one in the road that I'm in.

Even though we violated sometimes.

But maybe with the situation of doubt, right?

I don't want to change someone.

All right.

There's the entrance road length.

It's based on the number of ingress lanes.

Oh, egress notes, right, because that was supposed to be a measure of how much traffic your site was getting.

So it goes all the way up to 300 feet.

That's a pretty good distance.

You're going to have that at like major shopping centers again.

All right.

Turn lanes, remember I mentioned turn lanes, and it's good to get out the main line and then slow down and then make a turn.

So there's standards that based on what's called the Harmelink equations.

Harmelink

was an engineer back in the 50s or 60s.

I think it was the 60s who came up with this standard where it was like you're expecting X many percent of vehicles to have to have to hit the brakes.

It depends on the volume of the vehicles on the road.

And then it depends on the volume of the vehicles that are posted to turn.

And then it's how many people are turning and all that kind of stuff.

So that's what that table is, that chart basically

One side of the shark, you don't have to have a term like, you don't have to have one.

Above it, it has to have at least a hundred foot storage area, above all of that, it's a hundred foot five foot, and then it kind of moves after that.

You know, engineers, when I was going to school, we loved these kinds of sharks because you got your

You got your slides and put it up there and give you lines and, oh yes, I need one.

No, I don't.

I'm in this area, interpolate between them and all that kind of stuff.

It works.

Why do we not say everyone is an entrepreneur?

I mean, theoretically, that would be safer.

If every entrance had a term plan, that means people were going pretty close to the same speed on the road,

speed differentials, what's going to cause a crash or manage the severity of the crash.

So why do we require generating this everywhere?

Right-of-way costs.

Well, so right-of-way cost is that VDOT's building it.

But if the guy who has that business there has to build it, then right-of-way cost is not an issue for us.

Oh, come on, come on.

I gave you slight clues.

I mean, still requires a lot of thinking, but little clues.

All right, so remember, we're going to support

of economic development, economic progress, as well as traffic safety.

OK?

Finding the balance.

There you go.

When you find the balance, if someone's running a daycare, I'll grab this bag of something.

Last.

If someone's running.

A artisanal last.

Artisanal last.

Perhaps.

a hairdresser that maybe gets, I don't know, 40 cars a day.

Making that person spend the $50,000 to $100,000 to build a turn line doesn't make sense.

It's going to kill that business.

They're not going to have the money to do it.

They're going to be deeper in debt trying to create their business.

If they decide to move ahead, it just doesn't make sense.

balancing the economy.

There's one other reason.

When you put turtle in, what happens to the roadway?

It gets wider.

What happens when pedestrians went across that road?

It's more challenging.

It takes longer.

If we've signalized it, now it takes us

minimum green time per direction now has to be able to take care of the pedestrian crossing the road so normal calculated speed per pedestrian is about three feet per second so that is well feet so four more seconds for just one side of the road if it's on both sides you know so that's four more seconds of green time would be required to be had

in that direction, or if the vehicle traffic is not that high, well now we're holding people off for other stuff.

The point is, it's a balance.

So we have these equations set out so that we kind of get in the right area.

Now, there are some roads where it might still be better to do that, but it depends on the situation, depends on the speeds, depends on the volumes of traffic.

You just have to look at

All right, site distance exceptions.

All right, so, you know, we allow exceptions to the spacing standards.

Now we're gonna take that word exceptions and throw it away.

I say this because in VDOT speak, an exception is a variation from the Asher Greenbrook.

A waiver is an exception to a VDOT standard that's in the word design.

And so, if you cannot meet intersectional side distance, you know, from the audience, well then, you know, when you were to meet stopping side distance, and the stopping side distance is the minimum that's required in the actual network.

Well, we'll say you can't even actually stop at that distance.

Uh-oh, then we have an issue.

Well, you can apply for an exception to that.

Here's the issue.

We do not give those out very often.

You have to have a very interesting situation that's going to preserve public safety for your interests.

Because that means that when you're pulling out of that entrance and a person is coming on the main road, they do not have enough time

to react to your pulling out and then stop it before they get you to paper.

So, yes, it does happen sometimes.

People can get exceptions.

It does not happen often.

Avoid it at all costs.

And if you're with the local government and you're looking at plats, you know, request of plats and that kind of stuff, you want to make sure they can get an entrance into the city.

So if they can't, you guys let them plot it, we're gonna have to give them an entrance, otherwise it's in most combination.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be the kind of entrance they want.

It could be, sorry, you can't get a commercial entrance if you want to get private entrance.

Or, sure, you can get an entrance, but if you're working to get that entrance, you're gonna have to spend $500,000 to shave off the rest of the road.

so that you can enter side distance.

So it's really important on the local side.

You guys are going through flats, ordinary flats, all that stuff.

Maybe this goes with VDOT, maybe not, that's okay.

Just make sure that there's side distance somewhere.

You don't want people getting killed.

That's the important part.

All right, multimodal activity centers.

I bring that up because we are in Charlottesville area.

So, how many years ago was this?

About 12 years ago, DRPT hired a bunch of high powered consultants, and Hannah Tordell was involved in that process.

There you go.

She was here when I was the district planner.

All right, so they

develop a process for sort of an urban development.

In other words, hide spacing of intersections, you know, relatively, I'll call it right-sized roadway segments, that kind of stuff, okay?

But it's a process.

It is not just, oh, here's the standards, go use them, okay?

It is, you go through a planning process where you're like, okay, locality,

What is your emphasis for this area?

Is it public parking?

Is it park space?

Is it green space?

Is it bicycles?

Is it pedestrians?

Is it public transportation?

Buses?

What's the emphasis for this segment?

Yes, it can have multiple emphasis.

Having covered that, you're also looking at what's the density of activity centers.

You're looking at all that kind of stuff to determine sort of which designs you should be using for that specific location.

Only one locality has taken us up on that.

We've incorporated it into our design manuals, Printings B2.

Fairfax County is doing it.

They're not going for the whole county.

They're going for the different activity centers.

We're heading down.

And some folks at the secretary's office are like, why are so few people doing it?

Well, because it's an involved process.

You've got to have a very robust, comprehensive plan.

You have to sort of narrow where people are going to be moving to.

And the zoning's got to be pretty solid.

It's not a case where your board always approves the rezoning, even if it doesn't match the plans and all that kind of stuff.

So it's a process.

All right.

Now we're moving on to innovative intersections.

You guys have been waiting for this, right?

Innovative intersection part.

Especially if you're dealing with SMART SCALE, innovative intersections are a good thing.

Do you know them?

All right.

So VDOT's policy, if you're doing with arterial preservation network, you shall consider an innovative intersection as part of the design before considering maintenance.

There are newer reconstructing signal,

you should consider, and it's evaluated as part of the signal justification report.

So those are important things, especially as they deal with the land development process, but also as they deal with SMART SCALE.

All right, so Quadrant Roadways.

Quadrant Roadways means that the main intersection of the two main streets doesn't have any left turns.

It only has throughs and rights.

and then you've got a lead them off to the side where all the left turns happen from.

There are some urban areas where this sort of happens naturally.

It's not necessarily, you know, all we were designing is a quadrant by the way, just kind of happens, but it does have to be sort of intentional in terms of that main extension.

VDOT,

funded one and had it built.

It's in the front of the oil.

It ends up that way during apple season and that kind of stuff.

Nice little drive-thru.

You couldn't tell anything's weird.

It's just like an intersection.

From an access management standpoint, it reduces 32 conflict points to 30, but it also separates them out.

So once again, it's that driver overload feature.

You know, it's like, only have a few here, only from there, even through, you're good.

Everybody moves.

Everyone's favorite, strip their crossing U-turn.

Who's used these?

Who's used one of these?

If you're traveling North Carolina, there's a lot.

They work.

The cut down crashes, significant,

Study Texas, we're talking in some cases 40-50% reductions.

It works.

Yes, it's a little bit of a pain.

If you're trying to do a left turn in some cases, you've got to go out, around, U-turn.

It's just some people really hate U-turns.

But U-turns overall tend to be a little bit safer than a left.

Don't know why.

It's a weird thing.

I think it's because we don't have all these other competing movements.

It's basically you and the guy coming from that direction.

It's not, you don't have the other side actually.

All right, so from an access management standpoint, we're down to 18 conflict points.

And again, spreading them out.

So it completely falls into the theories that support access management.

meeting U-turn.

I don't remember seeing one anywhere.

Shame there.

That's not saying it doesn't exist.

I haven't been everywhere, but I don't remember seeing one.

But it's another option.

And guess what?

You're down to 16.

Yeah, 16 conference events.

And they're spread out.

He's found more than any of the other ones.

So it functions, it's safer, and it works.

And now to the king.

All hail the king.

Roundabouts.

So roundabouts, you are down to eighth conflict points.

And even better, every single one of them is a merge to merge.

So

You might have more crashes, just like a traffic signal.

It's possible you will have more crashes.

Look, you're all going to do merch to merch.

It's going to be fender vendors.

You're not going to have injuries.

Shouldn't.

I'll take that back.

If you're drunk enough, you can cause an injury.

How many of you guys have been coming as to the funding through SMART SCALE, right?

Canvark and at Six and what did we do, one?

I don't think Canvark was funded.

I don't think so.

Yeah, that was funded in the last round.

And I know some people still don't like them, but I mean, let's face it, VDOT has been pushing them now for 30 years, give or take.

They work.

It does take a little bit of retraining your brain if you're used to stop and go kind of stuff.

Near subdivision where I live, there is a roundabout that was just recently put in, a couple of years ago put in,

and I still find people, you know, they'll roll up, they'll stop, they'll be looking around like, oh my God, what do I do?

And then they go, but that's okay.

All that means is they've just created a potential for rear end collision, which is not fun around this chart, but you know, if they were using it correctly, theoretically, that wouldn't happen.

Yeah, roundabouts, they work.

All right, any other questions?

That's the end of my presentation.

Now you guys are, you know, the whole of one of the, I think it was the first, the emerging diamond intersection.

As I and my wife like to put it, everyone said, there's a piece of printing.

It's working?

We can have it offline.

Okay, all right.

People like to run lights.

That's the big, personally, why I'm using it.

I think you always have to watch out that people don't want to wait and run for life.

I think that it's shorter than other DEI's that I've seen and I think that

I think if there was more room and they're getting more healing space because sometimes it does back up.

We cannot get onto the ramp that the bridge is set for.

And it's personal experience.

And then, you know, it's development.

I think we have some large plan native developments that are not going to build in that area.

And we're going to find out what kind of stress can be placed on that when already we're having some zay or rare or actually killing that prevents

It just happened.

Now, an interchange with a lot more traffic is going up in Fredericksburg area, Stafford, Stafford Courthouse.

That one carries a lot more traffic.

It works.

and we don't have any significant issues.

Of course, it's relatively new.

It's going to be much larger.

Yeah, it is larger.

That's a different issue.

I do sit there sometimes because it's a very

You are pieing bacon on the right hand side because of water showering.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My suggestion would be is that I think at these interchange, it's relatively new to the GDI that there is a time

you know, access here by Proctor entering DDI and then education are what a DDI is, right?

But like if you're, you know, at least something go, hey, you're about to, you're from West Virginia, you're heading to West Virginia, you never, I mean, maybe, I don't know if the DDI is not, but as an example, if you're from out of state, at least notify somebody that you're approaching an intersection you may not have seen before, that may not be in your state.

So, the difference between community standards or locality standards and VDOT standards, so obviously the locality can't weigh VDOT standards, but they can be more rigid than VDOT standards.

Where

Where does that merge or meet when you're required by law to make sure everybody has access to the property?

So that kind of depends on that situation we're talking about.

Is it the VDOT project that's creating a situation and the county's statements are similarly connected, that kind of stuff?

Is it a developer is building something that the county's approved?

A different situation, all right?

I think most of what we're gonna deal with are gonna be

If you're talking about implementing this in like an ordinance or something enforceable, you have to kind of work through that.

So I work in Campbell County, they have a transportation overlay district.

And so one of the things that they require, they have like a few ways that you can get past that.

One of them is if you can get a right to a shared access from an adjoining property.

And so you would have that the developer, the person who wants to develop the site would have to negotiate with their neighbor and say, hey, I need to share your

I just remembered something.

So actually Albemarle County was a perfect example of something along those lines.

In that on the north side of 29, before you get to the river, they required each developer as a property developer to build a perimeter and it would

but the adjacent properties.

So when those adjacent properties develop, they don't necessarily get access to 29, but they get access to that bunch of road, then they extend that bunch of road to the next one and so on.

It's not necessarily the best solution for Route 29.

Certain other roads I think would be the perfect solution, but it was a way to sort of control the amount of connections and to sort of keep it working.

There are regulations now that can be secondary.

We can accept that into the secondary system.

So it's not like, you know, someone else has to maintain it forever and all that kind of stuff.

You've got to take care of it.

So there are ways to accommodate in certain situations.

I have a question about slip lanes and innovative intersections and kind of the pun not intended the intersection between safety and I guess operations or throughput.

Is there like a

I know that some roundabouts we have do have slip lanes and some don't.

I cross a slip lane every day to get to work.

Like I walk across it downtown Charlottesville.

So a couple of things about slip lanes.

So there's slip lanes and then there's

Separate right turn lanes that are separated by an item.

So in our definition a slip lane is one where you get into this turn lane or in this island and then as you make the turn you're in a new lane so you don't have to yield to anyone or anything like that.

So for us that's what a slip lane means.

When people just say it off hand

It could be the other as well where you've got the island that separates you.

You turn, you know, you don't have to listen to the signal.

You just go under yield control and just go.

So I have a different presentation that shows some designs where you can do that and have the pedestrian in the sight line for the vehicle from the driver so that, you know, when they're coming down there, they see the pedestrian

as they're sort of starting to shift their attention to their own version and that sort of stuff.

But yeah, that is a factor.

And there have been instances where VDOT has taken those out because the amount of pedestrian use has increased so that the risk for striking on the pedestrian is now exceeding any operational benefit or any benefit of avoiding a rear-render of a vehicle.

So it's really a site-by-site issue

There are studies.

Not a ton of them.

There should be more.

VDOT had sort of been looking at that, but I don't think it ever got funding for this study.

Now, there are other states that have funded those studies, and I think there was an NCHRE study on it.

If there wasn't, there was something associated with the Transportation Research Board.

So, okay, how many of you know the Transportation Research Board?

Okay, it's part of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's sort of the engineering part of the National Academy of Sciences.

And so it has committees that look at stuff and they have big input on NCHRP studies and all that sort of stuff.

But the Access Management Committee, oh shoot, they didn't remove that.

Well, they transferred its roles.

It's not like it's gone and all the people are dead, all that kind of stuff.

But it's moved over to the, is it the roundabout?

No.

Innovative Intersection of Access Management, whatever.

The committee name has changed because they've combined it with some other things.

But they had a website that listed a whole bunch of research on access management and its impacts and all that sort of stuff that used to have links to some studies.

The FHWA has a brochure that talks about, you know, the economic impact of access.

Some of the stuff that I remember reading, I don't have it in front of me, so I can say, yes, it's exactly this.

So that during the construction, you can have a down term.

Sometimes the year after, it'll still be a little bit lower.

But generally speaking, after that, it improves significantly as because

With Access Management, people...

I already used my wife as an example.

She absolutely hates going to short-term.

Because the traffic is just so stupid.

So if you can do something about that, Access Management, people are more likely to go there.

If you have a business there, then we get more people going by, and then you can get somebody to go in and, you know, look at your business.

So it depends on the business.

Does it depend upon pass-by traffic or is it a destination?

If it's a destination, it's not going to have a whole lot of impact at all, theoretically and based on studies that I've seen.

And we still have, I mean, let's say it's a jewelry, I'm going to say I use a jewelry store.

Let's use gas station.

A gas station.

So a gas station is very high pass-by traffic.

So that means convenience is number one.

because you're passing by it.

That's why you pull in to get the gas.

Unless it's BJ's, which is sure, at least the price is really low.

It's just an issue.

But we're just not going to talk about that later.

So for those, yeah, it could have a negative effect.

It's not usually as heavy as some businesses claim because they'll say, oh, it's completely destroyed my business.

It could be a 20% or 30% down there.

That's significant.

It's not like 50% of the business, but it's, you know, it's a quantifiable number.

But there are studies out there, you just have to search for one kind of bond.

Yeah, Carson.

I have seen plans with them.

Because they're talking about on the fifth street, there's a diverging diamond, MPO tech and policy, but we're looking at smart scale.

And I've always looked at that design to be like, hmm, how's that really going to work?

Yeah.

I think any interchange is going to be somewhat problematic.

for facilities like that.

There's not an exception to that.

Yeah, I had a friend who lives in Redlands on the other side of the 5th Street Bridge.

Yeah, so I mean, that could be an issue.

So, you know, I grew up mostly-ish in Northern Virginia.

They've got a bunch of trails and, you know, sidewalks and stuff.

When the Fairview County Parkway was built, there was a what I'll call a substandard multi-use trail.

But even with it, you know, there were a lot of interchanges along the way.

And every one of those interchanges, whether it's

Cloverleaf, almost Cloverleaf is not that one because of the age but they're all kind of problematic because you know if you're staying close to the road that's better because you're in sort of the sight line for the traffic that's trying to get off onto the get you know get onto the parkway but for the ones that are coming off of the parkway it's problematic because you're not really in there

visual angle as they're trying to merge, you know, oh, oh, no, there was a Trump, not a Trump, it's, what is it called?

Kind of like an offset dime.

But, you know, it doesn't matter.

Every one of them has issues with them.

And I just don't know how, you know, we've adjusted some so that the crossing is going to be like the lower speed portion of the lube ramp.

So at least the vehicles are going slower, the driver's focusing forward, so he's going to see the pedestrian and the bicyclist more likely.

You know, things like that.

I just, in my heart, I just don't feel that there's a really great solution there.

Thanks for that.

Yeah, my gut tells me the same thing.

There's not really an elegant solution for merging those two.

There's two different functionalities.

Fun fact before we move on, in 2009, as a young planner, I worked on the Greene County multimodal corridor study for 29 and 33, where we did an access management plan.

We did that for TJPDC, and it's still, I just Googled it, it's still up there on their website, but I don't think anyone's looked at it probably since 2009.

Sir, I want to thank you for coming.

This has been a fantastic presentation.

We'd like to, I think I staid Berta, we'd like to invite you back.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for taking your time and coming all the way here.

That's right.

That's right.

It's 14.

I don't know.

So I hope all of you are signed up to attend the Transportation Language Planning Forum.

We put that on every other year.

It's aimed at local government officials, PDCs, MPOs.

That's still one of our target audience.

And it covers, you know, transportation topics like this one.

In fact, there's a more in-depth presentation on access management in this one.

It's probably a little bit more technical.

But now that you've got the basics, maybe you're ready for that technical.

You know, there's presentations on that SJR process that we talked about, the signal investigation report and all that kind of stuff.

There's things like that.

There's presentations.

I think that our keynote speaker this year is the county administrator for Prince William.

You know, I mean, we try to get the whole perspective in there as well.

It's online this year.

We ran out of money.

Just pushing snow and ice.

So my funding comes out of making this budget.

It's snow year.

It's like all my plans go.

But seriously, if you have a chance, you know, try to attend.

It's online, so if you don't have travel, I mean.

And it's every other year because the alternating numbers, we have a VDOT-only one where we try to get all the VDOT language folks all together, some of the folks from location design, you know, just so we go, okay, make sure you're up to speed.

Here's what's happening, here's what's happening.

We're just doing a massive down-to-lift.

Same here, so I'm good.

Well, thank you very much.

Well, thank you for the opportunity.

For those of you viewing in the corner, we

I've been at the planning district a long time, and the fact that I remember Hannah Twaddell, who was here when I got here in late 1999.

She was the assistant director with the staff for this initiative, small limited.

So, wow.

Anyway, one of the several hats that I wear is as the director of legislative services here, worked directly with the local government.

in the region on their behalf by navigating with the state legislature and with other state policy makers.

So you're probably aware we came out of a 60-day general assembly session in mid-March.

The key takeaway is they did not complete action on a budget, which I've been telling the story here in the last month and a half or so that first year

General Simney did the people budget that at least that I remember.

They did the germs, their session without doing the budget.

The local government was like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do?

We need to know our funding from the state.

Now, if this happens so much, they don't even blink an eye.

At least I don't hear them being eyes collecting or anything being said.

So it's unfortunate that they can't get the work done in the amount of time that they've allotted.

But here we are, and it doesn't look like it's going to be in probably June, if we were

There's a budget resolution.

There's a big hang up over the Senate included in its budget revenue that could be used by virtue of eliminating the sales tax on data center equipment.

The House did not include that budget or that item in their budget.

So there's a big billion dollar wide gap between the amount of resources that the Senate

and the House has in their respective budgets.

So that's the hang up until they resolve that issue again.

I think it's going to be into June.

They won't be able to decide how much they have to spend and where they can spend.

But I will tell you about a couple of transportation things that were in both the House and Senate budgets or in one or the other.

You have characterized the budget this year in terms of transportation.

We're more focused on transit.

Kind of the main thing in the House budget was funding for VAVA, which is Washington, and their operating costs.

They need about $50 million from the state.

The Senate, because of having some additional revenues by virtue of the sales tax exemption going away in their budget, they put close to $300 million into the title of the transportation fund.

Biggest part of that, including funding for WMATA and to and from about 190 million, was also focused on transit.

So my guess is, depending on where they land, assuming they land somewhere before June 30th, is that they'll find WMATA, and that might be about it.

There may be a little bit of dappling here and there, but I don't anticipate that there's going to be a lot of issue in terms of transportation or transit area

They'll be wrong.

They won't push.

But we will see sometime in the next couple of months.

A couple of other things that I would just point out from the budget, and these are both language items.

The General Assembly includes not just appropriation items, but language that directs certain things to happen.

They did direct the Department of Railroad and Public Transportation to look at funding opportunities for transit-oriented development, particularly around

transit and rail stops or stations.

We are looking at where there might be barriers related to housing and economic development.

And then there was also some budget language looking at how they can accelerate improvements that are being made on I-81.

There were some provisions that have been placed to generate powers up and down the valley providing more improvements.

So we're looking to see if they can improve all those improvements in the timeline, I guess.

and then I started to study again in the northern part of the state and transit down in the interstate area.

So I wanted to point out just a few handful of bills that we had.

Probably the main ones were the repair of house bills and Senate bills that would have, again, a little bit more focused on transit, but also some transit in not just Northern Virginia, these bills are all coming from Northern Virginia,

House and Senate bills, trying to do a little bit different things.

One of them would, or two, one of them that was impaired, they would reduce the state sales tax, and then expanded the sales tax to digital services, which is something the state's been talking about for the last several years, and that would have generated some additional money for the transit, but also for transportation needs, and now in regards to the state, they would have directed that the income

existing, I guess there's a highway user fee for alternative vehicles, electric vehicles, and that would be something that would be statewide, this regional highway use speed to generate additional dollars.

None of those bills went anywhere.

It was a fairly broad coalition of transit-related organizations that were lobbying for those bills.

When the bills died, they started shifting to budget, of course, just to be playing with the budget link.

So, again,

I don't know if they're going to make much progress.

Another kind of transit related thing, House Bill 200, for those of you who are maybe familiar with DRPT's TRIP program, there's some changes made to that to give DRPT the CTV a little bit of flexibility in distributing those funds.

This bill is not passed, or that bill is passed now.

That's been a good bit of times because we have some interest here

Part of this region is part of the TJPDC's regional legislative program concerning the use of photo speed cameras.

Right now, the current law that's been in place for about five or six years, the past week, allows them to be used in school zones and construction zones.

And there's been efforts in the last couple of sessions that the state allowed them to

I'm going to say RAIN as a program.

It really has put some guardrails around the program.

And I think that's largely due to if you've seen headlines coming out of particularly some of the localities down in the Hampton Roads area.

Oh my gosh, all this revenue that they're generating from people who are breaking the law by running or by speeding through schools.

So anyway, ended up, had three different bills.

One, actually all of them really kind of has some guardrails in place as to how you use the money that's generated by any cameras that you have in place.

We'll kind of add some more transparency to the process if there's some additional information that would have to be included on summonses.

You gotta put up an additional sign.

One of those is gotta flash the speed as you're coming through.

So, again, guardrails.

There was a slight expansion to the authority, but only in Planning District 8, which is in Virginia, to allow them to do them in, what was the term in the news, safety red zones, which would be areas that are part of the destiny quarter plan,

for the safety action plan, and VDOT.

And then there was some additional authority also put in with the use of cameras for monitoring pedestrian crossings and stop signs.

So have that.

The three of y'all have speed cameras, school's done at level 33 by elementary school.

Was there one around the high school, middle school?

So you've got two locations.

No, not right now.

Speed zone, school construction zones, and school zones, and how we can stretch them together.

It's an effective reduction in speed.

It's not a moneymaker, which the sheriffs may have presented it to my nation, but

Yeah, I got some numbers from somebody in the Sheriff's Department last summer and agreed with you.

It's not even in Albemarle.

They've got two sites now.

One just started this school year.

I mean, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's not millions.

It's being generated at multiple sites and some really high levels.

So anyway, those bills have been fine, tongue in cheek.

So building 32, like really a study build, directly VDOT to look at potentially designating vulnerable road user safety zones and building at areas where there's been elevated crashes, injuries and fatalities involving pedestrians and bicycles.

And then we'll be able to report back to the general

A pair of companion bills or companion bills that will allow VDOT to enter into an agreement with USDOT to take over the environmental review and transportation projects for a period of five years.

And then there's also a pair of bills that pass

to allow the counties to authorize the use of bus obstruction monitoring systems by public transit agencies.

You know, a lot of stuff is more, again, oriented towards transit.

This session, you know, just more or less what I would characterize as building.

So, I know you all, you know, as planners, I think we, Sandy's getting ready to leave in the moment of presentation.

Kevin Bill, my office neighbor.

I mean, there's this little beady going on call pepper today, but we'll be there.

Just kind of on the land use side, there were a lot of bills this year.

I mean, we've been seeing this past several years, just kind of really, you know, more prescriptive policy setting at the state level in the area.

local government bodies authority over land use regulation.

You know, and I think, you know, something Rob was talking about, I don't want to despise, I mean, use the words, you know, he emphasized shall.

So there were a lot of shalls in some of these bills, you know, shall allow by rights, shall be deemed to include, shall be deemed as a permitted accessory use, shall require a special exception.

So,

You know, a couple of the bills didn't make it through the process, but, you know, vacant houses and accessory dwelling units, battery storage for solar, ground and ground and solar modules, all had some bills that were gonna, you know, tell you more of what you have to do with those areas.

So, you know, I think there's a growing sense, or at least among the majority that was

in charge this year, either not liking what they're seeing at the local level or seeing an action at the local level, and we're trying to get it more standardized across the state, things that may be a mismatch at the local level, and just taking a really more active role in setting more prescriptive policy at the state level.

There were, if the reading passed, there was substantive.

There was House Bill 994, that's the Northern Virginia Planning District, I mean, so I don't have that much to think about.

House Bill 1220 is the main bill that has the guardrails, a lot of new language there, and then the one related to expanding to

I think the perspective after attending that meeting last Thursday with some of the legislators is just the difference in perspective.

It wasn't articulated that well, but locally,

We may have residents that vote for a certain thing, but isn't necessarily good for some of the state's goals.

But that's the whole point of having local elections and local ordinances is sometimes the people in that community don't want affordable housing.

They want to block people out.

So it creates conflict between the state and some of the lobbyists that provide money.

want certain things, and those things don't always match up with what the people in the individual community want.

That's very, you know, Fairfax wants vastly different things than Greene wants or Louisa.

Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right.

And, you know, I think we're seeing that play out in the state budget.

You know, as Tom knows, you know, the data's in the development we had in Louisa, and, you know, Northern Virginia seems to be tired of it.

And, you know, the people that are

you know, closely looking into finance in the state or looking at that instead of tax credit that they put in place in the 30 years ago, how much now is costing in terms of lost debt.

But, you know, I'm sure there's other areas of the state with well over the percentage as well and other areas that may not have been checked.

That's just one kind of high-profile issue, I think.

Sure.

Well, as you're looking at next year's, you know, I mean, I'm always looking back at applying gender.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

Glad to.

Thank you very much.

All right.

There's been a lot of activity at the CTB related to SMART SCALE and just all things transportation.

The most significant of which is for SMART SCALE, they took action on expanding the eligibility for the high priority projects program.

So that's the program that if you submit an application, you're competing statewide.

So localities are eligible, transit agencies, MPOs, PDCs,

They expanded that eligibility to include innovative intersections.

So not just great separated interchange projects, but also roundabouts, ARCA, all those innovative intersections that we got a nice presentation on today are now eligible to be funded out of both plots, the district grant and HPP.

So that was the action that they took on that one.

They've also had just a lot of presentations, deep dives about SMART SCALE, about project performance, about safety,

So we can provide a link to those packet materials if those would be of interest to you all.

The person isn't on and unable to attend today, except... That just means that we have more talk around that.

I guess, is anybody planning on submitting

Two thousand submitted, two.

Fingers crossed.

You've got two for both of you, one for Greene and one for Nelson.

So probably the next four, I'm assuming we have an update on the SMART SCALE Vloggers that were submitted

and Ms. Brown and we'll talk about that.

So we'll have a good feed up, really good feed up.

This is a good one.

We'll have a really deep dive.

The list is long.

All right, Sarah.

So the first thing is we really just wanted to close the loop with everyone on our big project this year, which was the Rural Transportation Needs Assessment.

I got to have some lovely conversations and then the survey results.

Just wanted to, like I said, provide this memo.

It was really illuminating getting both the survey results and having some of those discussions as to how we can best assist you.

Switching my hats in this committee where I used to just be just the RideShare representative and now kind of steering the ship for saying it was, I mean, invaluable for how much it could help us figure out how we best support you and understanding because, you know, looking back on things in the past, so much has changed that

What you need from us and how we can help you has also worked with that.

So we very much appreciate all of your help with this, looking over that plan review memo and letting us know some small area plans that needed to be or that need to be updated at some point, keeping that on our radar, looking ahead at everyone's comprehensive plan update schedule,

I know we were kind of in the middle of some of you had completed them, some had started, some are getting ready to, but just again, getting that on our radar as the dates for all of that, being able to look through it, understanding the support that you need and possibly identifying grant opportunities, especially as SMART SCALE we're finding may not work for every situation that it has in the past.

That data collection is definitely something that we can put on our radar to assist with.

for those small area or comprehensive plans.

But yeah, it was a really great process.

I hope that you guys enjoyed it and feel like that you got to really put in some input on there as well.

And one of the big takeaways, which will segue lovely into the next one is we realized it's definitely time for us to update our role plan, long range plan, because of that data then helps you guys exponentially as well.

Yeah, just like I said, wanted to close the loop as we're getting close somehow to the end of the fiscal year.

I don't know where the time has gone, but we wanted to make sure that we were getting this project seen all the way through.

And we were able to take a little bit away specifically that rural long range land as to developing our work plan.

And then we'll also be revisiting this, you know, for next years and the next years.

So the conversations will probably continue to happen.

But thank you all for your input.

Well, I think I'm next on the list here.

This is a good segue into what's included in your packet, which is a draft scope of work for updating our rural long-range transportation plan.

So that's included in there, partially because Sarah did say it is pretty updated.

It was last adopted in 2018 by the commission.

and also VDOT asked us to update this plan.

They said it's been a while since you all have refreshed the projects that are in there, the data that's in there, and asked us to get included in our rural work plan.

So a copy of that draft local work was included in your packet.

We also included a copy of the last rural work plan that was adopted in 2018.

We did confirm with VDOT staff that there are actually no formal guidance documents for the rural long-range plan, so it's not like a legislative requirement.

even though Federal Highway asked VDOT to do these, who then asked us to do them.

So we don't really have a document that we can refer to to say we have to do this plan update this way.

So the approach that we're taking is really just updating the sections that were included in that previous plan.

And because this was our last meeting of the fiscal year, we wanted to be able to kick off in July with starting to do some of this work.

So we wanted to get something in front of you just for your feedback if you had any questions or anything that you wanted to add to that.

Since this will be our major work product for next fiscal year, most of your RTAC meetings will also have some component of this that will come before you in a presentation.

This plan was also formally adopted by our commission.

And so when you all get updates, the commission at their supplement meeting will also be getting updates.

So we'll be working pretty closely with you guys on the data parts, on the project parts, just so that you know what's going before your elected officials at the commission meeting, since they ultimately will have to adopt this plan.

So the only other thing I wanted to note on the scope was that due to budget and staff constraints, we are unable to do like a full-scale public engagement effort for this plan.

And so we look back at the previous one, it doesn't look like it had any chapter for public engagement, but we intentionally will go back and review recent planning efforts.

I know for Move Safe in Blue Ridge, there were a lot of pop-ups, a lot of opportunities for the public to weigh in on transportation challenges in their community.

and also lean on you all if you have any ongoing planning efforts that are going on that could use some of that public engagement for that as well.

So that's mostly what I wanted to touch on.

So I glanced at it and I noticed that there were two board supervisors numbers on the research and one was no longer with us.

I'm assuming that's part of the main board that you all

reengaging another two board supervisors and members to review that on that end.

What can we do as planning staff?

Because the first thing that comes to mind, this might not be the document because it's a rural document, and the counties like Louisa, where we don't have intersections that are fun and safe enough, don't have projects to apply for SMART SCALE with Brown for the first time all around.

And so is this an opportunity

kind of put those in this plan, knowing that the intersections are rural in nature, so it's just 250-15, which is there between Savannah and Louisa.

Then we put that in there, we can reference it the next time we go.

That's really the first thing that comes to mind, but it may not be the appropriate document to do that in.

So I'm throwing that out there and I'm looking for an answer.

That's just my two cents.

But what can we do to assist you other than making ourselves available to me with you,

So whichever you see fit as far as sharing the scope with your leadership would be perfectly fine with us.

I think exactly like you said, like just being available to help be a second set of eyes.

Like if we pull the data for your local jurisdiction and we say, hey, can you all review this?

Does this look right?

Do you have any questions about it?

and really just ensuring that it's not a surprise if it comes up on a permission meeting before your board members.

We want everybody to feel comfortable with it when they see it.

That would definitely be helpful, yeah.

Like if you all have any ongoing opportunities, things that you already do in the county that we did

So, I thank you.

Hey, everybody.

I'm sure everybody knows that the Notice of Funding Opportunity was dropped.

The application deadline for this year is May 26th, so it's a month earlier than we expected, which doesn't give us a lot of time.

Due to that, this might be like the final reminder for jurisdictions.

If you have any projects that you would like to pursue, please let us know immediately so we can schedule them initial.

meeting with you all and trying to go over that.

There's $1 billion available in funding.

The split is going to be 70% for implementation funding.

There's going to be a highly competitive round.

So, and when I say final round, I mean, in this shape or form, final round, they seem like they want to extend the program in other years, but we just don't know the details about that yet.

So far, we have reached out to all of our jurisdictions at the TJPDC.

We have received positive answers from three of them.

Hey, Gorjan.

Hey, I'm going to apologize for how long it's taken.

Understood.

Thank you.

We have about 15 working days to get everything together.

Thank you.

Now again, I can't believe how fast this year has went by, but since it's technically our last meeting of this fiscal year, we wanted to get those dates in front of you.

You will notice they follow a pattern with the exception of November, of course, because the first Tuesday in November is election day.

And we know many of you, your offices are closed.

So we certainly don't want to make you work on a holiday or a closed day.

Initially proposed the 10th being the next Tuesday as the option.

But please, if that is an area of conflict, just let me know.

And we can, as soon as we get these approved, we'll give you guys a little bit of time to think about it.

We'll go ahead and get this calendar holds placed and new invites out there so that we know that we are going to go.

Yes.

Great point.

Yeah.

I think that works the best for everybody.

I mean, you know, it's cold.

Nobody wants to come out if they don't have to.

And we certainly have that option.

We do have the option to have two online meetings based on the schedule, though, that would make the August meeting.

There are only other viable options that you can't have two in a row and they're only being four.

Well, we'll see if everybody has things that they can't compare it for.

If you're getting feedback, no one can leave the office.

All right.

Anything else for TJPDC?

Round table it is.

Who wants to start?

So for Albemarle, we are in the midst of SMART SCALE, in the midst of all that, we have received some feedback on revenue sharing, like staff recommendations on funding, so not the guarantee on funding or not.

It looks like we might be

It looks like VDOT might be not funding our full request for one of our projects.

We might have to make up the I think remaining 300k through either SS4A or through RAISE, I'm not too sure yet what we plan to do.

I'm going to the Board of Supervisors in May for the secondary six-year road plans.

We did a new procedure for that this year where instead of for the county here we need to have two-thirds of residents on the affected road vote yes to have the road paved.

Typically it was me basically sending out letters to all these people and tracking their responses one by one in a lot of spreadsheets.

That was a mess for a multitude of reasons.

We changed it so that if a person requests, I basically send them the information about the program and the list of people I need to hear back from.

They get the signatures.

When they're ready, they send it back to me.

And then VDOT reviews it.

That's been a much better system.

And as well as that, we are looking to do something new called the Unpaid Road Improvement Program, which would be capitalizing on the General Assembly bill that passed two years ago in the General Assembly, which would allow for rural rustic funds to be used for non-paving projects.

We're looking to

use that on roads that either cannot be paved and they're real rustic because of geometric restrictions or people don't want to do it or it would just be simply too expensive so that's something exciting that we're looking to maybe implement in this fiscal year like this upcoming or do it in FYI I guess 28.

Trying to think what else.

Oh, we're also going to the board in early June with our draft priorities list.

We took all the projects we have and all our plans.

We ranked them, mapped them out with six different factors, which are similar to SMART SCALE, land use, economic development, safety, congestion,

environmental and equity and accessibility.

And so that'll be interesting to kind of see how all of our projects shake out when we use this ranking system and give us a way to look into the future better and kind of plan for projects and kind of do that as we work towards making a multimodal and transportation plan.

Todd, it looks like you're up next.

Okay, so you mentioned comprehensive plans.

We are still working on our update.

I finally took some sections to our planning commission last week for a work session.

Let's just say we have some changes they want us to make to those sections.

We reviewed our introduction, our natural environment section, and a new section on rural preservation.

I've been working with the folks there at TJPDC and with Sandy on updating our transportation section.

We'll be getting that before the Planning Commission, hopefully in the not too distant future.

One thing that came up in those conversations, because I think many of you are aware that there is a very large warehouse facility going up on US 15 just south of Zion Crossroads.

And there are concerns about what that's going to do to traffic.

And Sandy had brought to my attention that there is a Zion Crossroads small area study that was done four years ago.

and want to look into possibly updating that to extend the study area further south because right now it just goes just a little bit south of the stoplight there at 250.

Let's see what else.

Again, Gorjan, our board meets tomorrow night, so I'm hoping to have a decision for you Thursday morning about whether we're going to go for State Streets for All.

See what else.

We're waiting on word on our streetscape application, TAP application, before Keenan Streetscape.

We actually had Mr. Byers come down and tour the project area with myself and Sandy and Pat Moore.

There are some questions that we have, so hopefully they were satisfied with the answers we provided.

The only other thing, you mentioned SMART SCALE earlier.

I had some conversations with Chuck Proctor and they didn't see anything of the Lavanna County that really rose to the level of competitiveness.

I'm hoping things might change in the next round because there is a, shall we say, a commercial development going up between the two banks on Route 53 near Turkey Sag Trail, which is going to increase traffic.

It's a fairly poorly kept secret, but nothing's been made official yet.

I just want to say I've been calling it Project Grimace, which is probably going to be a hint to some of you what it's going to be.

And those are really, I mean, of course, the Wawa construction's going on there.

It was on crossroads.

Want me to go?

Let's see.

Sure.

All right.

Well, let's see.

Jaunt.

We, April 14th, we launched a new service for Greene County called Green Today, which is a core zone mobility on demand service.

You can choose to book like you always have in Greene County for circulator service within, this is county, within the county only, to and from, not outside, that

You can book up to one day in advance or up to seven days in advance in advance reservations.

However, with this core zone, you can request a trip like an Uber, a shared Uber ride within like 30 minutes, 40 minutes, the same you would.

And the zone for that, I can show you what it looks like if you just indulge me here for a second.

Can you see a map of Greene County?

So this sort of a polygon here is the core zone.

That is the zone where you can do same day immediate sort of requests for trips to and from.

The green dots are the drop-offs, pickups and the oranges are drop-offs.

The way we drew that zone was 92% of all pickups and 93% of all drop-offs

in Greene County fell in that zone right there.

So we've launched this on April 14th and we need to get the word out a little better because it's not being utilized, but just know that this is out there.

So Jim and others, spread the word.

because it's fun and exciting.

And if this works in Greene, we could do this in other jurisdictions around areas where there's activity.

So it's kind of a huge thing, at least I'm geeking out a little bit here, but it's gonna be very cool.

Other than that, Jaunt still has a 50th anniversary.

We have some new logos and a new brand look and a new color scheme.

You're not going to see red, white, and blue buses anymore.

They're going to be like this color and blues and greens.

And our new buses probably will start driving on the roads next week or week after.

And we order about 15, 16, 18 buses every year.

And we dispose of old ones.

So as the years go by, we'll convert our full fleet to the new brand.

It's 50th anniversary.

We have, that's about it.

I would like to potentially revisit the virtual meeting policy and see what everyone thinks about

I don't get to know the reasons to do that.

Is that a requirement that we have to explain?

Um, so we're, you know, still working on our presenting and self-inditioned ordinance update.

It's been, gosh, at least two years at this point.

And then we're on a little bit of a delay because we're doing some extra exercises to stay with them.

Our hot topics are, for short, from when I was

and then lots of minimums versus sliding scale.

So those are our hot topics, but we're doing some overlaying and then incorporate some of the access management standards in Route 151 and Route 29.

So the goal is to kind of push development on the 29 and then we manage it better and push it away from Route 159.

We just sat in meetings all morning about our SMART SCALE.

Project and the colony that we would like to apply for, but it's some art cuts and there's a property owner who owns most of the other side of the gas station.

Used to be the dairy, big ice cream cone there.

Been closed for a few years since COVID really, but anyway, we're having some trouble getting

public and board by on that.

So, we'll see how that goes, but we would like to because two intersections and that stretch right there are ranked 18th and 26th in the region for PSI, which is kind of a big deal to me, I think, but

And then the other SMART SCALE project we have is on 151 at Rockstar's to the lane, Linnner-Turnway is there.

And our partnership services building is going up pretty quickly in Livingston, that's incorporating sidewalks.

Well, I think the big news in Greene County is that if you want an on-demand trains and ride, all you have to do is utilize the app.

I mean, everybody's been talking about it.

Hopefully we'll get more people out so that we have some good numbers.

The big things going on in Greene, we're beginning our comprehensive plan update.

So we're going to be coordinating with TJPDC on ways we can potentially cooperate together on that.

We have, it's not due to be late until 2028, so we have quite a bit of time on that.

I will share my experience with hard cuts and jade diamonds that

People make the mistake of calling on transportation improvements, but they really are safety improvements.

And people expect that it's going to be easier, but it's harder.

And that extra effort pays off because it is a huge safety.

The one we had was relatively temporary.

I mean, well, the construction was, it wasn't a massive construction project.

VDOT helped with the safety fund to do it.

And we went from

12, 15 accidents per year to one reported into two years.

So it's a significant safety improvement.

It can be a wonderful thing.

Yeah, that's one reason why you have private stakeholder meetings.

We'd like to get the buy-in.

There's three fatalities.

Those are the main things.

We've been working with VDOT on a SMART SCALE project.

We're doing the work of administration for that.

We have a big meeting with the CTB.

And at the end of this month, in theory for the additional funding for a innovative intersection, it's a continuous green team with partial signalization and a long acceleration lane so that southbound traffic doesn't have to stop on the lanes.

People who live in the development are pretty excited about the possibility of being not faster.

Jim, if I could add on to the green thing again with the mobility green today.

I encourage you to go to the App Store, download Ride Jaunt app.

There's another Ride Jaunt out there that's not us, so make sure you get the via Ride Jaunt app.

Yeah, test it out.

See, like, you know, take a trip.

Like, go from Stantersville to Rutgersville and go shopping and go home.

I don't know.

Just check it out and let us know what you think.

I definitely think it's something that we need to monitor and because a lot of these mobility on demand services are really not geared towards rural areas.

They really actually work best in urban, more highly dense zones.

So this is kind of a little bit of experiment.

I mean, you have activity centers in Greene, which is, you know, pretty much the corridor 29, 33, centers of little Ruckersville, and then the, whatever you call the area right by the Albemarle border.

Yeah, on 29, which is just a lot of, you know, housing and there's- Midway.

Midway or corner store.

Yeah, I'm gonna put you in touch with our communications guy.

He has all the collateral for that.

I'll make sure he gets that to you.

But yeah, I think it helps spread the word however you get the word out there.

All right, and just for the rest of the group, if you mentioned local transit, you're going to start Jason up again.

Louisa County, I'll keep it brief because I know we're a little over.

It's one of the fastest growing localities.

We recently hired two funding associates and an intern.

We're working on training them.

We have a lot going in Louisa County that's not necessarily country-related.

If you read the news,

But I think some stuff might shake loose for the next meeting.

I'll be updating you all on some other things.

So stay tuned.

Conference is planned.

We've closed, I think, the survey up.

So we're calculating, crunching, and continuing working on that.

If I'm here, update.

If I'm here, update.

If I'm here, update.

I will just say, as always, if you think of a topic that you would like to just have discussed here, please just let me know.

If you think of more topics for Rob, he was a fantastic speaker.

I think that went really well.

Hopefully you got some information that you needed, but if you need him, I think to expand on any of that, it sounds like he's probably game for that too.

So just always feel free to reach out to me.

Well done on the agenda.

But John shared with me his other four, what your investigation said.

Of course.

Yeah, the slides are actually should have been in the packet already, but if you need them, I'm happy to send them out again.

Yeah.

And then we made some notes of maybe some other things.

The CTB packet items.

I'm going to look at that, the Transportation Research Board and see if I can find some links like he mentioned that might be helpful.

Yeah.

So there might be

And I want to thank everybody online and in person.

I know that time is valuable even more these days, and I appreciate you all being here.

I really believe that us being together is important because we learn from each other.

So thank you.

And with that, I have a motion to adjourn.

Looking for a second?

Sorry.

All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.