Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   2/25/2021

National Transit Partnership, October 22nd, it is February the 25th, and I'd like to call this to order.

In the first order of business, I'm going to read the notice of electronic meeting due to COVID-19 state of emergency.

The governor has declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the nature of this declared emergency makes it impractical or unsafe

or the Regional Transit Partnership to assemble in a single location.

This meeting and the required public hearings will be held utilizing electronic virtual communication with the Zoom software application.

In accordance with virtual meeting procedures and policies on an item 4.0-1 of the Virginia state budget, House Bill 29, as effective April 24th of 2020, the meeting will be recorded and made available to the public

at tjpc.org.

All right.

And if everybody could mute themselves so that we don't hear, we're hearing some interference from someone.

So I would appreciate it if you could mute yourself at least for now.

And welcome.

We're glad to see all the smiling faces.

So I'm going to go ahead and call attendance.

And if you could unmute yourself to say present and then mute yourself again.

B. Lippy Still-Kurtley.

Oh, I see she's in the waiting room.

We'll come back to her.

Nikaya Walker.

Great.

Thank you.

Randi Parker.

Randi.

Okay.

Becca White.

I believe she is not here.

And Bea Lippy Stokerly.

I see that she is here.

Here.

Thank you.

Karen Davis.

Here.

Sandy Shackleford.

Here.

That's it, Diana.

OK, great.

Thank you.

Our first item on the agenda is always matters from the public, and folks have three minutes to speak.

Is there anyone who would like to speak that didn't have a chance to sign up?

Not seeing anyone, Jessica.

I guess we're good.

With that then, the first actual item on the agenda is the TJPDC update.

And we are happy to welcome Christine Jacobs to do that.

And Christine, I'm trying to find you on the screen.

Where are you?

There you are, waving your hand beside me.

And as we know,

We didn't exactly say goodbye to Jim.

We just sent him away, a little further away.

And Christine is now, I think your official title, Christine, is Interim Executive Director of TJPDC.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me here for this.

I haven't yet had the pleasure to meet all of you in person or virtually.

So I'm Christine Jacobs.

I'm interim executive director.

Previously, I was the chief operating officer and director of the housing program here.

So I'm intimately familiar with the programs of the PDC.

I have not had as much opportunity to sit on the transit discussions.

So I'm really grateful for the opportunity to learn with and alongside you all.

Just to update you, Sandy Schappelberg will be sitting as the MPO staff on the RTP.

Obviously, Sarah will continue doing that for ride share and Jessica is our lead staff member for the RTP.

With that said, as you all are probably all experienced at some point with major transitions and organizations, we're going to be as diligent as we know how to be to make this transition as smooth as it can.

but we welcome constructive feedback.

Please reach out to me directly.

I'll look forward to like contacting most of you all to get one-on-one meetings and get to know you a little bit better.

But until then, please keep communication open with us as we ride through this transition and continue to do the good work that RTP has been doing.

I guess I can open it up.

Does anyone have any questions about process or organization for Christine?

All right.

Well, welcome.

We're thrilled to have you.

And I do want to take a minute to just point out that Karen Davis is here.

Karen will be representing Jaunt, a new face at the table as well.

No, I'm thrilled to be a part of the RTP.

I was a part of it when it started and it's been wonderful to see it grow over the years.

I'm glad to be here.

If I start welcoming new people, I get into real trouble here.

I don't know if there's anybody else that's new here, but I think those are the two new folks that are at the meeting today.

The first actual item on our agenda then for approval is the draft of the meeting minutes.

This was the date that I was trying to read earlier.

So these are the minutes from October of 2020.

Are there any comments or edits that folks need to make?

Anything that jumped out at anybody?

The anal part of me says that we should correct B's spelling at the top.

I have one item too on page four in the section where it talks about, I'm asking about the APCs.

We've got the, it's saying ACP, it's automatic passenger counters.

Oh, so that's just a typo correction.

Yes.

Okay.

That's great.

That's why we take a look at them.

Any others?

Okay.

This is Lucas.

Okay.

We have a second.

And I'll just ask for a voice vote on these.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right, so we have our minutes approved.

Thank you, Diana.

And I'm going to share my screen because I really like to have notes when I talk to all of you.

And we can see it.

Perfect.

All right.

Great.

And just because I won't be able to see all of you in the corner of my screen, if you have any questions or comments, please just speak up.

So before we discuss membership, a quick note about the distribution of agendas and packets moving forward.

So back in October, I sent out our usual meeting reminder email with the full packet of meeting materials attached.

But because that packet was so large, a number of you did not receive it and didn't have any reminder of the meeting.

At the same time, I didn't receive any undeliverable messages, so I didn't know who hadn't received it.

So we tried to come up with a plan moving forward.

So this is what I would like to propose and I would like your feedback on it.

What I plan to do to ensure that everyone gets all the information they need is at least one week before our meeting

I'll send out two reminders.

The first will be a calendar invite that will include all of the Zoom meeting information and a link to the website, the RTP webpage, which will have the full packet there.

There will be no attachments to that calendar invite so that should go to everybody without any issues.

Then I'll also send an email reminder, which will look just like you expect it to look.

It'll have the full packet attached.

It'll have the Zoom meeting info.

If that full packet is particularly large, it might not go through to some of you, but you'll at least have received the calendar invite.

We can't see folks, so speak up if you do.

I think that sounds like a good plan to have the two emails.

I think that's great.

Anybody have any concerns?

Okay, so we don't need to take a vote on this or anything.

Yeah, that'd be great.

I don't think we need a vote on this.

I think this is fine.

Great.

So now moving on to membership.

So since our last meeting, which was way back in October, we've reviewed and started to clean up our RTP webpage on the PDC site.

And we're starting with the membership section.

So what you're seeing on the right hand side of my screen is just a screenshot from our webpage with everything updated.

So what we've done is update the website to identify the chair and the vice chair.

We have updated all of our voting member information.

And the biggest change is that I have removed any nonvoting members who have not attended RTP meetings in the last year or two.

Anyone who was listed as a nonvoting member on our webpage and had an active email address remains on our email list so they can continue to hear everything that the RTP is doing.

And they're welcome to contact me because we can add them back to the website at any time.

Jessica, this is Karen.

Just when everyone has finally learned to put jaunt in all caps, we've changed it to just a capital J and lowercase A-U-N-T.

It's part of our new rebranding.

So anyway, just if you could catch that as you go through your materials, that'd be great.

Thank you for letting me know.

We'll make sure to make that change.

So Karen, you're saying is it's a capital J and then small A-U-N-T.

Yeah, right.

So we, you know, we, oh, well, long story.

Yes.

Now it's just jaunt and kind of embracing what jaunt represents.

And so that'll be the way we write our name.

Okay.

All right.

Garland wears two hats, yes.

Yes.

I have left that one open.

Garland, do you have been representing Student Transportation for Charlottesville, I think?

OK, thanks.

I'm trying to give you more work, Garland.

All right, any other comments?

Okay, so you need to add Garland either there or put it under, however you want to do it, Jessica.

Okay, all right.

All right, if anything else does come up, please feel free to email me, but we'll move on.

So, let's see.

There has been a request from a community organization to be added to the RTP as a new non-voting member.

That request comes from the Charlottesville Area Alliance would like to appoint Peter Thompson.

to the RTP.

So if you are unfamiliar with either the Charlottesville Area Alliance or Peter Thompson, here's the information they gave us.

The Charlottesville Area Alliance was formed in 2016 to lead the advancement of an age-friendly community.

Working with Albemarle and Fluvanna Counties and the City of Charlottesville, they successfully applied to be a member of the AARP World Health Organization age-friendly network, bringing best practices to our local area.

They have over 30 partners across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

Charlottesville Area Alliance co-founder Peter Thompson of the center is being recommended as the CAA representative to the RTP.

He currently serves on the place's 29 community advisory committee and has served on the CAT advisory committee and the Rio 29 small area plan committee, among other community service roles.

So to give you guys a little bit more information, reviewing the bylaws for the RTP, the membership section under section two says, lists out all of these different non-voting, potential non-voting membership organizations.

It does not include the Charlottesville Area Alliance, but if you keep going through the bylaws, section three says that the partnership may recommend additional

voting or non-voting membership to the partnership as is deemed necessary to carry out its duties.

So we interpreted that as reading that we can use a simple majority vote of the voting membership to add CAA to our non-voting membership if that's what the RTP would like to do.

So

Peter, would you like to, I know everyone knows you, but would you like to introduce yourselves and just talk a little bit about what the Charlottesville Area Alliance is in case folks don't know?

Thank you, Diana, and thank you members of the RTP for considering CAA for non-voting membership.

I'm riding in a car on the way to escape winter as I speak, but glad to be able to zoom in and join you.

The CAA, as stated, is

To supplement that a little bit, we look to be a resource for organizations such as the city, the county, the health district, the planning district, and the RTP to help take an age-friendly lens to discussions that are critical to the holistic dimensions of wellness that WHO and AARP have identified through their data-driven process.

and we identified in a survey both in doing our own work and also in looking at needs assessments that others have done in the community in the last several years, that out of the eight dimensions of an age-friendly community, that the three priorities that are identified now are housing, transportation and social engagement.

So with that in mind, we were looking to not create a new structure to look at transit, but to align ourselves with

Sure.

Again, the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and Fluvanna County, the TJPDC, the Blue Ridge Health District, um, Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, John Jabba, the Center at Belvedere, um, Alzheimer's Association, private organizations such as Home Instead,

some of the senior living such as Westminster Canterbury but it's also the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors, Chamber of Commerce, the United Way, a lot of other groups that you may not think of they may not be focused solely on aging as an issue but understand that aging is impacting their ability to meet their mission and that their mission however whatever work you're doing is helping either improve or declining how age-friendly our

All right that's great thank you very much and with that I'm going to open it up for discussion.

What we have on the agenda then is

supporting their request to join the RTP as a non-voting member.

And this would be Peter Thompson would be representing the Charlottesville Area Alliance.

So thoughts from you all?

Sounds good to me.

This is Randy.

Second.

And who was the second from?

B.

B, thank you, dear.

All right, and I'm going to call for a voice vote because I can't see your faces.

Yes.

Yes.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Great.

I know you're in a car traveling, but I am intending to stick around.

Yes.

Great.

Welcome.

And we're thrilled that you reached out.

That's great.

All right.

So Jessica, I think we're good to move on to the next agenda item then, which is the DRPT technical assistant grants, which we're pretty excited about it.

Yes, so thank you, Diana.

All right, so the PDC received two transit planning grants from DRPT.

The first is the Albemarle County Transit Expansion Feasibility Study and Implementation Plan.

So the purpose of this project is to conduct a feasibility study and create an implementation plan for expanded transit service to population and employment centers within Albemarle County, particularly the Pantops area, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello,

and along Route 29 North, specifically between the City-County line and the UVA Research Park.

Innovative transit options to include on-demand service that emphasize accessibility and responsiveness to customer needs should be investigated alongside traditional fixed route options.

The budget for this project is just over $106,000 with half of that money coming from DRPT as grant funding and the other half coming from Albemarle County as a match.

The timeline for this project is about 10 months.

The project has officially just started and will run through the end of the calendar year.

And that timeline is really strict because we're hoping that that implementation plan will put a transit provider in the position to apply for demonstration funding with the next round of funding applications with DRPT.

Okay, so this is a slide showing the immediate next steps for this project.

So the RFP has already been sent out to DRPT bench contractors, and today is the due date.

I've already received a couple of proposals, so we will have some to choose from.

We have a selection committee composed of TJPDC and Albemarle County staff who will review the proposals and select a consulting team sometime in early March.

We have an advisory group made up of a variety of stakeholders who will be appointed by Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and TJPBC staff will function as project management.

And that advisory group will meet with the consulting team that's chosen and begin their work starting either in late March or early April.

So just to give you a better sense of what tasks will be included as part of the consultant's final scope of work.

So public outreach is going to be a major component of this project, and that's going to happen in at least two ways.

There will be an interactive project website that will inform people about the project and allow people to leave feedback about the project.

And there will be either online or in person, but I guess we're all assuming online workshops where people can give feedback on the project as well.

The consultants will work on a needs assessment for the study areas focusing on existing and projected demographic land use and economic data.

There will be feasibility studies for at least two transit service options for the study areas and ultimately an implementation plan for the single preferred service option.

And Jessica, I would just add that because this is Albemarle County-centric motion that's needed on this by the RTP, we will be giving updates to the RTP, but this is pretty much Albemarle County-centric.

And in fact, there's an urgency because of the deadline of January 1.

Yep, that's absolutely accurate.

This is Lloyd.

I note that we'll also be talking about a Charlottesville grant.

in a little bit.

The two studies and so on.

Because obviously, although the study is quote Albemarle centric, Albemarle is Charlottesville centric and geometrically.

And what you are doing and looking to explore will need to

Yeah, thanks for that point Lloyd.

And I also say here, as I've said a number of other times, my view of what Charlottesville needs for downtown Charlottesville's benefit is some kind of sort of a promotion of a, you know, a park and ride kind of a system where folks are parking in the county and riding into the city.

And so for us, truly, the answer is going to have to be a regional answer.

is gonna have to involve a lot of participation from Albemarle County.

So Lloyd, the quick answer to that is that the next grant we're talking about is Charlottesville, Albemarle, and UVA.

And that's what you get at what you're wanting.

So we'll go on to that one, unless there are any other questions about the Albemarle transit expansion.

It really deals with 29 North, Pan Tops, and Monticello as a tourism center.

But you're right, there is overlap.

But I think we're going to get there without any problem.

Good.

Yeah.

Any other questions?

Great.

So the other grant that we received is for the Charlottesville and Albemarle Regional Transit Vision Plan.

And I do just want to emphasize what Diana just said.

This isn't necessarily Charlottesville centric.

This is for the whole region, which also includes UVA.

So the purpose of this vision plan is for local leaders, transit agencies, and a wide variety of stakeholders to collaboratively develop a clear vision for the future of transit in our region.

Early work will gather data from a variety of sources to identify the types of transit service that can be supported on travel corridors throughout our region.

And the final work product will be a regional transit vision plan document that identifies short term, long term, and extended long term actions the community must take to support the community's vision for high quality transit.

The budget for this project is $350,000, with half of that money coming from DRPT as grant funding, a quarter of it coming from Albemarle County as local match, and the remaining quarter coming from the city of Charlottesville as local match.

The timeline for this project is about 18 months.

So it begins about now, and it will continue through the end of the next fiscal year, which will end on June 30th, 2022.

So this is a slide similar to the last one with the immediate next steps, not all of the next steps, just the immediate next steps for this project.

So we are still in the last stages of finalizing agreements and MOUs with all the necessary parties.

That's going to get done very shortly.

There is an RFP that will be sent to DRPT bench contracting firms and the major piece of that RFP is a draft scope of work, which we're going to go over in detail in a little bit.

Then we're going to give those consulting firms about three or four weeks to respond to the RFP and then a selection committee will review proposals and select a consulting team.

So there's an asterisk by selection committee there because that's one of the things we're going to ask you guys to vote on today.

We have a proposed selection committee and we would love the RTP to discuss and potentially vote in favor of that selection committee.

Then the Regional Transit Partnership will be very involved in this project.

The RTP will serve as the official advisory group for this project.

And one of the first steps will be to have the RTP meet with the chosen consulting team, review the scope of work and begin working on the project.

One of the other things we're looking at is potentially creating a new subcommittee of the RTP to last for at least the duration of this project.

So this subcommittee would represent a diversity of perspectives and opinions in the region that are not currently represented on the RTP.

And they would speak directly to the consulting team.

So, and this one also has an asterisk because we're gonna vote on that later in this meeting as well.

So that would happen.

The RTP and that potential new subcommittee would begin working with the consultants either late March or early April.

Okay, so let's see here.

This is a visual representation of the draft scope of work for the Regional Transit Vision Plan process.

As you can see, it's broken up into three phases, each with its own set of work products.

So in your packet, I had a slide describing each of the work products in detail, but in the interest of time, because we have a big presentation coming up after this, and to allow you to see kind of how each of these pieces all fit together,

I'm just going to briefly talk about each of these as we look at this slide, but you do have those slides in your packet if you want a more deep dive into each of these items.

So looking over here at our initial work products, let's first talk about the land use assessment and the transit propensity assessment.

So these are intended to be documents that gather technical information and quantitative data about the community, such as the number and density of workplaces, vehicle ownership rates, etc.

And these will inform our intermediate work products.

The vision statement will concisely define the community's understanding of what high quality regional transit means.

What does high quality regional transit look like?

What does it feel like?

What are the outcomes which it results in?

This will be the result of collaborative discussions among the RTP, the stakeholder group, and the general public.

All right, so moving into intermediate work products.

So as we all know, there are different types or categories of transit service like express, high frequency local, low frequency local, or demand response, among others.

These types of service function in different ways and meet different needs.

So the corridor specific service recommendations are intended to be a visual document like a map that uses the initial work products to determine what type of transit service can be best supported on each corridor in the region.

If that sounds really familiar, that's because this is very similar to what Richmond did with their vision plan.

The travel demand models, which are another intermediate work product, would compare a fully implemented recommended scenario.

So if we fully implemented everything that was recommended in that corridor specific service recommendation document, and we'll compare that to current transit service or a no build scenario, and that'll give us a quantitative way of comparing what we have to what we might have.

And then finally, we have our final work product.

So this would be the document, the Regional Transit Vision Plan, and it would summarize all the previous work products and recommend short term, long term and extended long term actions that the community would take.

So whether that's transit providers or elected officials or localities or the RTP, recommend actions they could take to fully implement the community's vision of high quality transit.

Are there any questions?

I know that was a lot of information to throw at you guys.

I do want to add that when we were

Discussing this at the very beginning, we were able through DRPT to add the word young people, which indicates students.

How that might play out, we're not sure, but we know that there is a need to move at times students, young people around our community, whether it's for internships or whatever it might be.

This is a, this is visioning and what the possibilities are.

So I want to make sure that everyone understands that and that's one of the

It's gonna be important for the city and the county schools to be at the table for this as well.

We talked about that when we were discussing this scope of work at the very beginning, just putting that out there.

So- Where are the subcommittee members gonna be selected?

I'm sorry, sorry.

Members, how are they?

So we don't have a really strong selection process yet.

So I'll talk about this a little bit more later.

Because I'd like to put in front of you a list of potential

or potential organizations that could be represented on the subcommittee.

But I think that the way I'm envisioning it, and Diana and Lucas, you can jump in.

Absolutely.

We have a long list we're going to go over.

Well, if there aren't any other questions, I'm going to move on.

Okay, so as I said, we need a selection committee to review the proposals that we received from the DRPT bench contracting firms and select our

So this is the recommended roster for the selection committee.

It includes both Albemarle and the City of Charlottesville.

It includes our transit operators, CAT and Jaunt and University of Virginia.

It includes the Albemarle County Office of Equity and Inclusion, and it includes us, the TJPDC.

These are the names of the people who would be representing those organizations or their designees.

Any thoughts about this one, folks?

We're happy to open it up.

Of course, this is the group that's just going to select the consultant, right?

I say just.

It's really important, but it is the selection committee.

Well, for the selection committee, I think you're right.

We were trying to keep the selection committee to not so many people, Jim.

because this is the consultant and I think Trevor could probably do that.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

Diana, this is Randy.

Just quickly, does it make more sense for me to do this or for Karen to do this?

I'm just raising the issue.

Now, we have you as the rural representative, Randy, deliberately.

Now, you guys have changed that.

OK.

That's fine.

So Jessica, do you envision that we take a separate vote on this?

Yes, I think it makes the most sense to take a separate vote on this.

We will not be voting explicitly on the scope of work because what we send out as the scope of work as part of the RFP isn't the final product.

That's not the end result.

So we'll still have a lot of negotiating to do with the consultants.

So if there's no more discussion or questions, I would entertain a motion to approve the recommended selection committee.

I move that we approve the recommended selection committee.

And that was a second, I think, from Lloyd.

I'm learning voices.

All those in favor, please say yes.

Yes.

Any opposition and any abstentions?

Okay, now comes the bigger part, Jessica.

Great.

All right.

So now I'm going to talk a little bit more about the stakeholder subcommittee.

And Nikaya, if I don't answer any of your lingering questions, please just jump in.

So the TJPDC staff proposed adding a subcommittee to the RTP for at least the duration of the Regional Transit Vision Plan project.

This committee would offer a diversity of perspectives from a wide range of transit stakeholders not currently represented on the RTP.

So the RTP would remain the official advisory group to the consulting team.

This isn't to displace you guys at all, just to add to it.

And the proposed stakeholder subcommittee would not replace engagement with the general public.

So this does not mean that we don't talk to the general public.

This is in addition to.

And I think it would complement any work we do with the general public.

The proposed stakeholder subcommittee would meet regularly, allowing for ongoing collaborative discussion between stakeholders and the consulting team.

So that's just a quick overview of it.

And then this is a list of potential stakeholder organizations.

It does not have to be, you know, we can go beyond this, but this is just a potential list.

designed to get people thinking about all the different considerations for a transit vision plan.

So what I want to do now is have a discussion about if you guys like the idea of this stakeholder subcommittee, and if so, is this the right list?

Am I missing anyone?

So I would add, under the land use development and housing, CRHA could go there.

Okay.

And I have to make sure we want to, this is where we want our school divisions.

We want Charlottesville and Albemarle public school system under education as well.

and maybe, I don't know, I'd let Jim and Garland talk about it, but maybe they would be able to cover the Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center pretty well.

I mean, I'm just saying this is a huge list.

The only other comment I would make is under safety, Charlottesville Police Department in emergency response, I called

Chief Lance today and ask if he felt like that there was a place that this was appropriate work for the Albemarle Police Department and he said he did not see any need to have the police department at the table with the stakeholder organization.

Now having said that, he said if there was any need for data or information they would be happy to provide it but he said he just didn't see this particular

stakeholder organization in the Albemarle County Police Department wheelhouse necessarily.

On behalf of, I haven't talked certainly with Charlottesville PD about it, but I would tend to agree from our perspective.

I don't know for given, given what I expect this, uh, this grant to be dealing with, I don't see

Either CPD, well, certainly CPD and emergency response wouldn't both be required.

I'd rather we're a lot fewer- I didn't see any need for emergency response either.

I asked Chief Lance about that as well.

I can't speak for CPD, but I did talk to police

you know, our police chief and he said no.

He said this was just not being his wheelhouse.

Right.

Diana, as a guy who participated in the Richmond project, this is a huge list.

Yeah, just a little bit.

I mean, this is comprehensive.

I mean, I just did a wonderful job, but it says when we're trying to work through

potential scenarios having this many folks.

We're going to take it.

We'll have to take it to the public anyway.

So I think that was what Jessica was trying to do, but she wanted our input to do that.

And I'm trying to whittle down for the safety group right now.

Right.

We're going to start to get into where we got

over representation with having so many groups that overlap.

So you're looking at UVA, you've got three potential pieces from UVA by themselves, you know, the hospital, the research park and the university by itself.

And then even university transportation.

I agree.

So how would you all like to look at this?

Do you want,

Jessica and a group to take a whittle at this and come back.

Do you want to try and do it ourselves today?

What do you all think?

I think it's too many people because we, the stakeholder groups can still reach out to any group they want, right?

Yeah, I think I agree that it's a little, it's pretty unwieldy, but I think

I think more sense for a smaller group or Jessica to try and whittle it down, I think would be challenging to do here right now.

But some of the overlap is obviously I appreciate the need to be comprehensive.

And I would lean toward, although I

Appreciate the stakeholder component.

I would definitely lean toward groups that represent directly users of the system.

And so I think that would be helpful as well, just to take some of the institutional nature out of some of the orgs.

But other than that, I think that Jessica and maybe a small group of people whittling this down, I'm not sure how this would work well.

Well, I think it's a great list to have and for public engagement and outreach.

So what would you all like to do?

Jessica, do you want to identify a couple of people from our board to work with Jessica to whittle this down a little bit?

I guess my main question is, what is the actual purpose of this group?

So I can speak to that and let me know if this answer doesn't go far enough.

But what I'd like for the stakeholder group to do is to represent those perspectives that just aren't adequately represented on the RTP itself.

I think particularly amongst our historically underserved communities or under land use and development, those perspectives are not, you know, they're not as

I guess my question is a little more basic.

Are there expected to be meetings of some group that these people would be added to so that they can add their perspectives?

Yeah, so I'm envisioning this as a subcommittee meeting, so they might meet perhaps every other month as a subcommittee, not part of the RTP, its own meeting.

They would meet at least a couple of times directly with the consulting team so they can have that conversation with them, like a back and forth about things.

I think one of the places where they have the most importance would be in the creation of that vision statement.

So when we're thinking as

As a region, what does high quality transit look like?

What are the measures that matter to us when we're talking about high quality transit for our region?

No, so to expand on that, Diana, it is not intended for the stakeholder group to alone make the vision statement.

So to go back to try and move us forward, because we do have a presentation, does anyone see or do you see in the regional employers and businesses, land use and development and housing community, those big titles or designations are appropriate?

and then within that, if there was a way that Jessica and maybe another couple of people could look at under those topics, leaving out perhaps safety, right?

Because that maybe designate people in those and come back to us with another, with a smaller list.

Does that make sense?

It certainly makes sense to get a smaller list.

The exact mechanism for doing it, I don't have a firm grasp on.

I maybe delegate that to Jessica, but I would say, again, maybe I'm not understanding how this group would work, but it would seem to me that no more than say two people from each one of these categories would really be able to

to be a workable group.

It's still going to be larger than what I would regard as workable, but it will be and provide for more diversity of experiences.

They have the ability to bring people in from the community from any group that they feel like is necessary to talk to, right?

And to engage in public engagement, right?

They would not be the core group that would work with consultants.

The RTP will still maintain its role as the official advisory group and there will still be general public engagement.

But the RTP is not going to be going monthly to a meeting with the consultants and doing the core.

The RTP is intended to meet with the consultants regularly.

They are going to keep you guys updated about how the project is going and seek your input on next steps.

But that's that is updates.

That's not actually meeting with the folks and working out the the plan and the I mean, I think we're talking we're probably saying the same thing.

We're just saying it in different ways here.

Okay.

So thoughts, folks, because we do have a presentation here, we

This is Randy.

I agree that I'm just trying to wrap my head around what I just heard.

Does that mean that the city of Charlottesville, for example, is not a stakeholder organization?

So yes and no.

Anyone who's on the RTP is not going to necessarily be part of the stakeholder subcommittee, although they can join the stakeholder subcommittee if they want to.

However, because you're members of the RTP, you're going to have that direct connection to the consulting team as we work through the project.

So may I just, I didn't realize that you're going to need the transit agencies to be on this subcommittee because you're going to want data and information directly working with the consultants to help move the project along because they're going to be asking questions like, can you operate on this street?

So it's going to get down to that detail.

Yep.

I think it sounds like we still have a little bit of work to do, but that should be something that the transit operators are going to be able to do as part of the advisory group.

I'm thinking of it as three layers, right?

So we have our, you know, the foundation is the advisory group, which is the RTP.

You guys are the ones who are already very engaged in thinking about transit and coordinating amongst each other.

And that's going to be our foundation for the vision plan.

And then we also have this layer of stakeholders who are very informed on these issues and or the communities they work with.

So I guess I was confused as well I didn't mean to confuse anyone I'm sorry Jessica.

So may I ask one thing?

And I know we're, I don't want to belabor this because I've got, I'm a part of that large presentation that is the CAT presentation, not the kinetics one, but the CAT presentation that's going to happen at five o'clock.

But there's a technical team that needs to happen.

And I assume that's what, where is that technical team?

Because that's the group, that's the transit operators that are going to be working with the consultants, that part of your team.

Is that the advisory group or is that the stakeholder group?

So I envision that as the advisory group, but it sounds like people are asking really good questions and I don't want you to feel like you have to vote on anything or commit to anything without being fully informed.

So it sounds like I need to come back to you guys with a bit more information and a clearer plan, or at least a clearer way to explain what we're envisioning.

So this will come back to us, right?

Any other thoughts or comments from folks?

Because I do want Garland and everybody to have a chance for their presentations.

All right, so this will come back to us.

And then so Jessica, we don't need to vote on that.

And do you want to?

Well, I guess we'll just put that whole piece off until next time.

Sounds good.

Yeah.

All right.

So proposed meeting schedule was in your packets.

Basically, it just says that the remaining meetings through October would be at the usual time, the fourth Thursday of the month from 4 to 6 p.m. And the November and December meetings fall on holidays.

So what we've opted to do is cancel both of those and reschedule with a single meeting on Thursday, December 2nd.

still from 4 to 6 p.m.

And I think, folks, the main change is just to drop the November and December normal meeting and split the difference and have a meeting in early December.

Okay, any other thoughts about this?

And I don't see the vote on this, but we wanted you to have the dates and then specifically look at the December going on and canceling November and December and then having the early December meeting.

So hearing no objections, we'll go with what Bea said, and we'll assume this is brilliant.

And we will move on.

All right, thanks.

All right then, we have a presentation and I'm not sure who's presenting.

It's not on my agenda.

So I'll take it from here, Jessica.

No problem.

So I would ask that everybody think about this as the CAT presentation.

This is Charlottesville Area Transit presentation.

We hired a consultant a little over seven months ago.

One of the things I wanted to do is try to

get some better data and work through a model where we can figure out how to start to turn around our declining ridership.

So this is the presentation.

So I'm going to introduce two individuals that are on Ben Chambers with Kimley Horne, who is our primary and kinetics transportation group, James Baker, who's actually going to do the presentation for us.

The presentation is divided into three sections.

So the first part of the section is basically

what we talked about and giving you some data which is APC driven.

So there's a dashboard that was created.

And as we're talking through this, I'm gonna ask that Ben go ahead and start pulling that up, share his screen.

I mean, Jim Baker pull that up and go ahead and share his screen.

And then there's a quick other presentation that's designed around just giving you a kind of a quick overview of the

what we have to work through as a team as we are thinking about transit planning.

And then the third part is what we have built the proposed 22 budget on.

So with that, you see over to your right, Jim Baker with Kinetics Transportation.

All right, thanks Garland.

I hope everyone can see my screen.

Yeah, as Garland mentioned here, he brought us on board in the summer to look at CAT service performance.

And the first thing we did was we gathered ridership data with some automatic passenger counters that were temporarily installed on the buses, just to get a handle as to just what are the ridership characteristics that CAT's experiencing during COVID.

And so we built this interactive dashboard, which is really was helpful as we worked with Garland and his staff as potential service recommendations for FY22.

I just wanted to kind of spend a few minutes to show you just kind of the dashboard since this was such a major

input into the service recommendations we'll be talking about later here.

So there's several dashboards created here.

This first shows

OK, this first is just kind of a key performance indicator dashboard to just kind of understand how ridership has been going on a route level basis, how the productivity has been.

And we pulled that data for three different time periods, summer 2019, fall 2019, and summer 2020 to get a sense as to just how COVID has impacted CAT ridership.

And if you look at summer 2020 compared to summer 2019, CATS lost about half of its ridership.

And in response to that, Garland and his team has reduced CATS service by about 30% there.

And that's just been kind of obviously common throughout the industry there in terms of those kinds of losses.

But there are starting to be some rebounds now.

With that data that we had, we're pulling from the buses.

We see it.

It's pretty faint, but I think they can see it okay.

We're good.

This is a little better.

Okay, great.

So we were able to collect stop level ridership data.

And so this is just a dashboard that just shows the boarding and alighting activity throughout the entire CAT network.

And with this dashboard, we're able to

drill down and look at ridership on a route level basis by time period by day of week by direction.

So we're really able to slice and dice the data in a lot of ways.

And, you know, we've got several dashboards here that just where we can look at how productivity is by time of day, you know, by stop.

Just, again, lots of ways to slice and dice it that was really helpful to understand just where ridership is, you know, being retained the most during COVID where it's been impacted the most.

On-time performance, certainly an important thing for attracting ridership.

So we did, we were able to pull on-time performance data.

This dashboard here shows all of the CAT routes and the green means that the buses were running on time, those routes, the yellow is early and the red is late.

So being that this was collected in the summer when traffic was lighter,

There was a lot of early arriving buses at various time points.

We're able to look at it on a trip level basis as well.

This is just looking at like Route 7 where you can just kind of see by trip how that on-time performance is looking on a trip basis by direction.

I'm going to interject for one second.

So this was, I thought, the kind of the fundamental pieces that we needed to do before we would be able to really start drilling down and making any recommendations.

So this, I know Diana had a concern early on that she wasn't able to see information.

This was just the basic of what transit agencies are supposed to be able to provide, you know, the people who pay for the service.

So this is kind of our way of getting our foot in getting foundational information so we can actually build from here.

Now, the temporary APCs that we had on our buses was a very small sample.

I'll just add as well, just these have been set up in a manner as well that Garland and his team will be able to update this on an ongoing basis and expand that database that you just talked about there as well.

So it'll be really helpful and effective to continually monitor ridership and see how it's rebounding.

So that's kind of again a flavor of the analysis that we did.

Next I wanted to just share this one of two PowerPoints here.

We thought it would be helpful for Garland and his team to put together a PowerPoint that

basically presents what's, you know, what we think about when we're designing transit service, what's good design principles and practices so that, you know, more of kind of an educational piece, if you will, so that, you know, as Garland's meeting with various people that are asking, you know, making requests about service at this point, place or that place, you know, that there's can be, you know, helpful to understand what, you know, we as transit professionals are looking at.

So the first thing we did here was just kind of like, what makes transit attractive for someone to use?

And really it comes down to determining if a person's gonna take transit, the demographics of the area, the trip characteristics of the person that's making that trip, the price and availability of the service and the quality of service.

So under demographics, we're looking at, of course, densities, not only just overall population densities, but minority, low income, no ownership densities, characteristics like that.

And we do have this information in those dashboards that I was just showing.

Trip characteristics, you know, what's the purpose of the trip that someone's making?

You know, are they, you know, just is it a single trip to and from work or, you know, is it trip chaining where they're going to stop at the grocery store and the dry cleaners and all that?

Because that has a big influence as to whether transit's going to be, you know, potential, you know, even beneficial for the person making the trip.

You know what time they're traveling, you know how many people are traveling together, all those factor into if someone's going to choose transit.

And we pulled some information from Atlanta from some work that we some data that I had just as an example that was showing how

Home base work trips typically, like in the Atlanta region, are over 13 miles in length.

Double home base others and more than double non-home base trips.

But home base trips is really only 15% of overall travel in the Atlanta region.

But when you look at who's using transit, it's, you know, 44% of the riders, you know, using transit in Atlanta are, you know, making that trip to and from home, to and from work.

And just to go back to that slide, help me with what your HBW, I know it's me, but what is HBO and NHB?

Home base work, so a home to work trip, home base others, so that could be a home to shopping, home to school trip, not home base, like, you know, shopping to, you know, the daycare, places like that.

Okay.

Price and availability.

You know, someone's going to, you know, think, you know, be evaluating what modes are options for them.

And certainly on price, there's a lot of hidden costs that people don't really think about in terms of automobile, automobile costs.

It's just not the fuel, but the maintenance of the car, insurance, licensing, you know, all that sort of things, as opposed to transit where, you know, with cab, buying a

1230 day passes would cost $240.

So certainly there's a potential cost savings if you're able to use transit there.

Quality of service, very influential as to whether someone will use transit.

And we've identified five areas under quality of service that we focus on as transit professionals.

That's travel time and reliability, how frequent the buses are running, how direct is the routing, the stop spacing, and span of service.

So travel time and reliability certainly has

Congestion by time of day really can influence and adversely impact travel time.

As transit planners there, we wanna build in recovery time at the end of each bus trip so that if a bus is running late because of a congestion, it can hopefully get back on time for the next trip to help make it more reliable.

So those are some of the things we look at.

Travel time, you know, it's kind of interesting, just as you're waiting for a bus, you know, you may be waiting several minutes there, it may feel a lot longer because you're just standing around waiting for the bus, you know, as opposed to when you're on the bus, you know, so people just perceive travel time much longer when they're waiting for the bus as opposed to when they're riding on the bus.

And then when you have a network that results in a lot of transfers, especially transfers to routes that do not operate that frequent, that has a significant impact on ridership there.

Just having that certainty that you only need to get on one bus and not have to make a transfer helps for sure in terms of attracting transit ridership.

Frequency also influences ridership.

We show here in green anything 15 minutes or better.

It's relatively frequent service.

People don't feel the need to be checking the schedules and timing their trip as opposed to when it's supposed to be 16 minutes or beyond.

That's when you start to need to really plan your trip much in greater detail.

How direct the routing is.

Certainly just having a route that's fairly direct will help make it more competitive with an automobile trip.

But there are times where you just need to introduce some deviations in the route because there's some key destinations that warrant that deviation.

This example on the right here is

is an example of a route in Atlanta where every other trip makes a deviation either north or south of that road there because they were, you know, key destinations in those areas.

Loops, we really as a, and when we're doing route planning, want to avoid big one-directional loops because

I may work okay if you're traveling in one direction, but it creates a lot of extra travel time if you're traveling in the other direction.

Some loops are okay if they're fairly tight and not too much out of direction there, but certainly bi-directional service is most preferred.

And then stop spacing.

Where possible, where feasible, it's beneficial to consolidate stops just to help with that transit travel time and help speed up that bus a little bit more if you're able to do some consolidation.

And span of service, that's very important as well for attracting transit ridership.

A good example is someone that's working at a

at a store at 3 o'clock in the afternoon to 9 o'clock at night shift.

Well, if the bus is running at 3 o'clock, but it's not running at 9 o'clock, you're not going to be able to capture that person on transit.

Weekend service as well helps attract ridership.

One of the big things in our industry is the discussion of frequency versus coverage.

Certainly frequency is going to help attract more ridership.

But at the same time, coverage is also important as well.

And I guess the point I'd like to make here is that we don't really see it as an either or option there.

That there's just going to be areas where you're going to need to provide that coverage because of

It's maybe serving a low income neighborhood or an important destination with a social service agency, political considerations, things like that there.

But certainly there's always kind of this balancing act as to should you concentrate your resources with frequent service in key corridors or should you spread it out to provide more coverage within the community?

And again,

Never really an either or option.

I would just say this is something that we all struggle with, especially with the new state model, meaning that they're rewarding for more ridership.

So your tendency would be if you really want to talk about just getting ridership done, you would really focus on your high frequency corridors and turn your frequency up to prompt people to use it more.

The example would be looking at how our trolley route, which runs fairly direct from the university to downtown, is our highest ridership route because it's so direct and it has such a high frequency.

If you do that every other place, then our ridership potentially goes through the roof, but that also leaves coverage areas where people need service.

So we're struggling with this all the time because we don't have an unlimited budget.

There are sometimes some opportunities.

This is an example here where, you know, perhaps in some, you know, depending upon the situation, you might be able to combine two routes on the same corridor to get some frequency.

But then the slide on the right there shows where if you keep on a part, you know, you're kind of expanding coverage there, you know, people that, you know, have greater access to transit, you know, and the person in the scenario on the right.

We also thought it'd be beneficial to put in here just a little bit about how transit is paid for and that there's really three components of cost to keep in mind.

There's the capital cost, but also the annual operating and maintenance costs, which can get very pricey, as I'm sure you all know, and then the state of good repair costs to make sure things are staying properly maintained.

So capital costs, of course, being associated with the physical assets, the vehicles that you're purchasing, the bus stops that you're building, elements like that.

The operating and maintenance costs, again, associated with the daily operations.

And a large part of that is gonna be associated with labor costs.

And I'm trying to,

Can't forget off the top of my head, but I think it's about 70% or so of agency's costs is typically related to labor.

Non-labor's, fuel and parts and supplies and such.

CAT, their annual operating budget is around $8 million.

So that works out to where adding one-hour revenue service is approximately $80 an hour.

It's also important to keep in mind that there's federal Title VI requirements that you just can't go about putting in new service without taking into consideration Title VI impacts there.

Are there any disproportionate impacts to minority or low-income areas?

Garland said in one of our sessions on this, it's not like he can just do whatever he wants there that every service change needs to keep in mind Title VI requirements.

So with that in mind there, with all those elements in mind there, we just looked at CAT specifically in terms of those service quality elements.

And the first being travel time and reliability.

and there are some routes there, the five, seven, eight, and 10, four routes that do travel through shopping centers, through pantops and barracks and so forth there, where it does certainly slow down those routes.

I'm sorry, Jim, just out of interest, routes 5, 7, 8, and 10, I have no idea except the one that goes to Stonefield.

Yes, 5, 7, they're running up the 29 corridor, they're going through Barracks, they're going into Fashion Square Mall, Stonefield, 8 goes into Stonefield, 10 is over on the

Okay.

All right.

And then, you know, another thing we noticed is that there's very little recovery time built into CAT schedules.

So if a bus does have some delays on a trip, it can be hard for that bus to get back on schedule for the next trip.

Now that really hasn't been an issue recently because of COVID and traffic's been lighter than normal.

But as traffic's returning, one would expect that to become more of an issue.

And then we looked at how routes transfers work.

I noted before about the travel time being such an important element there and how transfers can adversely impact ridership.

You know, CAT does have a number of routes that do meet at the downtown transit center at the same time to help facilitate quick, easy transfers.

But there are some routes that operate at odd frequencies where you're never going to be able to get a time transfer on a consistent basis with other routes.

So that's certainly something else that we were looking at.

Frequency and Span of Service.

This chart here lists all of the CAT routes on the rows there.

And then it shows the frequencies they're operating at and how long.

So this is pre-COVID service level.

So Route 1, as an example, starts in that 6 a.m. hour and ends in that 9 p.m. hour, and it's running 60 minutes all day.

You can see those reds, Route 4, Route 9,

there's periods when that was running at 70 minute frequencies.

So getting back to that last point, you can't make a 70 minute route meet with a 30 minute route on a consistent basis all day long.

The green is the routes that are operating at 30 minute or better service.

I think a key thing to highlight that Garland mentioned earlier,

Yeah, the trolley and Route 7, which is a US 29 quarter route.

Pre-COVID is running at 15 minutes for the trolley and 20 minutes for Route 7.

And they were carrying 60% of CATS ridership.

As far as the directness of routing,

There are some good examples.

Route 3 runs south from downtown along Fifth Street, very linear, no out of direction travel, which is, you know, ideal.

Route 2 that also runs south of downtown along Fifth Street and back up Avon is a big one direction loop, you know, one of those things that we

There are some routes that make some fairly significant mid route deviations that take people out of direction.

and a few routes with some split alignments in the middle of the route and a few routes with large direction loops there at the end of the line.

So those are some of the things we would like to begin to try to address as we look at potential service modifications, which we'll be getting to shortly.

Stop spacing and accessibility.

When we looked at where cat stops are, they seem fairly appropriate, about every quarter of a mile, which is ideal.

But certainly, as the picture shows on the right, there's some examples where stops with no sidewalk, which impacts accessibility to the stops.

and of course in a town like Charlottesville with the rolling hills and the street network.

A stop may be a quarter mile from your house, but because of the street network and topography and such, it may actually be further to walk to that stop.

So those are things that we always have to take into consideration.

And then finally, just want to acknowledge that there was a TDP that was prepared for CAP back in 2018.

And there were a number of recommendations there that did try to address a lot of the issues we just talked about.

And so we tried to build upon that and the recommendations we're going to be sharing in a minute with you all.

Probably the one area where it differs.

One of the things that you'll see in our recommendations is

Rather than have a route operate at 30 minute service in the peak periods and 60 minutes in the midday, if feasible, we'd rather see it operate 30 minutes all day because Charlottesville being a university community there, there's not as much of a drop off in ridership in the midday as like you have in a larger city where you have a larger portion of those transit riders being work commuters.

So that's that presentation.

Well, I would just say that this is kind of the, that was the nuts and bolts of how we look at things before we are designing.

So the next piece was, this is a presentation we have actually already presented to Trevor, Kevin, Andy, Laura,

team over at Albemarle County.

And we talked through a number of these issues.

This is the same presentation.

This service level is a need to get in front of city council and the board of supervisors.

If you're willing to do that, to really talk about where do we go from here?

These are recommendations that we're making now.

This is not trying to contradict or discount the larger planning process that's going to happen.

That's 18 months.

but we are in a real need to start to turn around our declining ridership.

So we're looking for ridership and we hope these service changes that are being recommended right now will help us to stem that tide of decline and start to turn it around to get it back to where we are increasing our ridership to work on that

that model that comes from this state to get this funding.

So Bea has a question, I think, and I would like to stop for questions right now, Garland, before we go into this next section, just to make sure people didn't have any questions about what they just saw.

Yes, thank you very much.

And thank you, Mr. Baker, also for your presentation.

I just have a question, something I've seen around mainly Albemarle County, but maybe including Charlottesville, is the lack of amenities.

where people are just standing there next to a pole there is no covering there is no place to sit down and if you've got groceries or small children or you're older and hell if you're younger you want a place to sit down and wait for the bus to come also in clement weather which

we tend to have.

Do we have any plan to be able to have more amenities at the bus stop?

I know I mentioned that when developers want to build something on 29, I mentioned building a

you know, a ridership or a bus stop with a bench and everything.

Yes.

We are.

So Diane does a real key about on the county side that we need to be more purposeful about getting amenities put in place.

We are working on that plan right now.

So one of my staff that I hired, was a new hire, his name is Steve McNally, actually was a capital guy at GRTCs coming over.

We are looking at putting in a standard bus stop package.

And we're working through the details on how to get that done on private property versus public property.

So we are getting close.

We are asking for additional funding as a part of our state application and we also need to do some fairly detailed planning about every single bus stop needs to be, an inventory needs to be done to see if it is at all possible to make it, bring it up to ADA code.

So there's a lot of work needs to be done, but we are starting to put the pieces in place

to actually get to the place where we're starting to add amenities.

You'll start to see our first couple examples probably in the next 60 days.

So just to add to that, the problem for Albemarle County for Garland is that our bus stops and amenities have to go on to VDOT right of way.

And so Garland, we've had a series of meetings and we're trying to figure out

But Albemarle County is not as involved with this B as it's between VDOT and CAT.

But we're working through the process.

Garland has been great.

Carrie Shepherd is helping us.

So we're trying to get there.

But you're right, we desperately need them in the county.

Yes.

I'm just curious is the is the requirement that it be on

Public right-of-way or VDOT right-of-way, is that a legal thing?

Is that a policy thing?

Well, it's a matter of Albemarle County roads are all VDOT roads.

Our public roads are VDOT roads, county roads.

Garland was talking, for example, about putting a bus stop on, perhaps on adjoining private property.

Okay, I understood you.

I understood you to say the difference.

So I'll just say there are two different, there are two different processes that we have to follow.

So there's a public process that involves VDOT and there's a private process that we have to work out with individual property owners.

And we're working through those.

The examples that we're talking about putting up and you will see will be with private properties first as we're working through the VDOT ones.

Our way through it.

So are there any other questions before we move on, just to make sure there are no other questions about the data?

Because this was great data.

This is more than we have seen in the past.

And I'm just thrilled to see that this is happening.

So thank you.

But are there any questions from anybody?

If not, then Jim, I guess you're going to go on.

Okay.

All right, so yeah, this last piece of what we have to present here is potential FY22 service proposals.

And it's really a starting step to try to address some of those issues we just talked about in terms of transit design.

So it's not getting it all the way there, but it's a starting point.

So a refresher on the existing CAT network, pre-COVID,

13 routes, generally service was 6 a.m. to midnight, very, very limited Sunday service.

And I've got some accessibility numbers here in terms of, you know, how many people, minority population and so forth are within one quarter mile of bus stop.

During COVID,

Yeah, CAT did not change their service coverage at all.

All the routes are still operating, but service is ending earlier.

It's ending at nine o'clock.

Frequencies were reduced on a number of routes, like the trolley, as an example.

And Sunday service has been eliminated.

So all that was in response to the huge drop that CAT and every other transit agency in the country saw because of COVID.

But, you know, Cat talked about, or I mean Garland talked about the ridership decline.

If you look at some, you know, just system-wide data for the past five years or so, annual ridership of Cats been dropping from around 2.4 million riders a year down to around 2 million riders a year.

And that's despite the fact that there has been some service improvements, some service hour increases that CATS put in.

So you look at your productivity, and that productivity has also been declining.

So reduction of ridership and increase in service hours means fewer passenger trips per every hour that a bus is out in service.

The graph there, this graph here at the bottom, it just shows the ridership.

The blue bars is the summer 2019 ridership by route.

The green is fall 2019.

So you can see like route seven and the trolley really have a boost in ridership when the university is back in session.

The red is the ridership that Kat saw this past summer.

So can you help us with Route 1 and 9?

Where are Routes 1 and 9?

Route 1 goes to PVCC, Woolen Mills.

The downtown actually hits over near the Riverview Park area.

And then it actually, one of the terminus is PVCC.

So it's

Okay.

All right.

So the CATS budget before COVID hit was being funded about 30% county, 70% city there in terms of when you look at that split on a route level basis.

So as we, you know, talk through potential changes with Garland and his staff, you know, we talked about just kind of what are some of the system-wide changes we need to incorporate.

And one thing is knowing that the 9th Street, 8th and Bond Street Bridge is closing and how that's going to impact temporarily where CAT does its staging downtown.

Another element we wanted to make sure we incorporated in any service changes is having a consistent span of service so that it's, you know, more convenient to, you know, you have that assurance that you can transfer from one route to another in the evening.

So we wanted to have service from like 6 to 11 p.m.

On the major routes and on the lower ridership minor routes, at least have service till 9pm.

And then we also wanted to restore Sunday service and get that in as well until 9pm.

As far as the downtown routing during the bridge reconstruction, we talked to Kat about this potential alignment change where buses from the west and south would temporarily use High Street to Ninth Street to Market Street and be able to stage on Market Street around 7th and 8th Street there.

and then buses from the north and the east, they would also stage there on Market, but they wouldn't need to really do that full loop and they could come, you know, return back to the north and the east like shown here on this diagram.

So that was just kind of a base assumption we had for, you know, as we talked through these FY22 improvements for a temporary basis there, this revised downtown staging location.

And then Garland talked to us about some other objectives that have been expressed in the past for any sort of service changes.

One was to provide service on South First Street, south of downtown.

Another was to provide service to the center on Ryle Road.

A key desire to restore Sunday service.

And then we talked collectively about just really wanting to make sure that any changes that are contemplated really try to, you know, make sure we have 30 minute or better service on some of the key corridors of the city, you know, the US 29 corridor, Avon Street, Fifth Street.

and not have any frequencies worse than 60 minutes.

You saw that table I showed earlier where there was some routes operating at 70 minute frequencies.

Now just to get back to 60 minute frequencies are better so that you can have the opportunity to create some time transfers between routes.

And then also to get the trolley service back to 15 minute frequencies.

Yeah.

I was going to say that would never have worked for me when I was at the university and taking it downtown to grab something to eat.

So what we've defined here and we'll be going through route by route are, you know, we've got kind of a lower and upper limit proposals here on several routes.

The lower level just tries to get, you know, it's a budget neutral pre-COVID scenario there where it's just, you know, working within the CAT service hours that they were running

pre-pandemic, but with a number of service modifications.

Whereas that upper limit increases the service hours, would require additional funding, and it reflects a 27% increase in service hours overall.

And with that 27%, we tried to expand weekend service on some key routes, improve some frequencies on some key routes, and add some additional service

between UVA and the US 29 corridor.

And I would just say, as he's going through that, this is kind of our starting point for real discussions with the lawmakers, the city council and board of supervisors about what is it that you want?

And we will provide that level of service based on and think about this as a cafe style model so you can You can get what you want.

So starting with Route 1, which is one of those poorer performing routes, it's really a coverage type route.

It's a 60-minute frequency route.

It's just, you know, it was carrying pre-pandemic just 150 riders a day.

We looked at and considered a number of changes, but in the end we thought, well, there are other areas where we'd like to focus valuable resources to and make improvements to because

So for the near term, at least for FY22, we suggested that just let the routes, this route in particular, stay as is so we can focus on other routes.

But we do have two options here.

Option one is just getting the route back to how it was pre-pandemic, which was weekday service only.

Option two is to add Saturday service.

This is the one route in Cat that does not operate on Saturday.

And so it would certainly be nice, even though it's a poor performing, very low ridership route, to get that on a Saturday service so that the whole network's operating on Saturday, we thought would be beneficial.

So you can see here there's a table, each of these routes, you'll see a map that shows the alignment, proposed alignment, and then you'll see some revenue hour numbers.

So you'll see like what Route 1 was running 4,100 hours a year pre-pandemic.

Pandemic, when the evening service was reduced, it was down to 3,800 hours.

So with option one, just getting it to pre-pandemic levels, it's getting it back to 4,100 hours.

Option two, adding that Saturday service is gonna require another 800 hours and get it up to 4,900 hours a year.

So you'll see this kind of consistent look here on each route.

So route two, we do have a number of modifications here.

Route two today is a big one direction loop.

It goes south on 5th Street and then goes north on Avon Street back north, back to downtown.

And what we really wanted to do was run this along Monticello and Avon bi-directional and having

at 30-minute frequencies, all-day frequencies, 30-minute frequencies, and then split it where a pattern running over through 5th Street Station to Willoughby Square and then every other trip coming down through new service, new coverage here in the county along Mill Creek Drive and up into the PVCC complex there.

So it's providing some new service that doesn't exist today, providing additional connectivity to PVCC as well.

We only have one option.

We didn't look at two options on this one.

I was just proposing this as a single proposal for Route 2.

So you can see it's a big jump in service hours.

Pre-pandemic, Route 2 is running at 5,700 hours a year.

With this sort of change, it bumps it up to 9,600 hours a year.

We just felt like that two direction service on Avon Street

that connectivity to both the street station to PVCC would be very beneficial in this part of town.

It also helps Garland as well because it goes right by the existing cap maintenance facility.

Westbound, okay.

No, I'm sorry, thank you for pointing that out.

So yeah, right now, this route operates only eastbound through the Fifth Street Station complex.

So we have identified here, like if CAT wanted to make this change,

Move forward with this change.

We're going to need to work with the shopping center folks there to find a place to make a stop in the westbound direction as well.

Route 3 is running along Fifth Street.

and as, you know, I think an example we held up there as a, you know, it's really very linear, strong service there.

Right now it operates 30 minutes in the peak periods and 60 minutes in the midday.

And route three goes where, Jim?

Oh, I should have looked at the map.

I'm sorry.

There is a piece of the three that operates kind of southeast of downtown as well, where it really doesn't warn that 30 minute all day service.

So we're suggesting breaking it up and that piece still operate at 60 minutes, but get that 30 minute all day service on 5th Street.

So now you have Avon Street, 5th Street, you know, with 30 minute

So Jim, I'm keeping an eye on the time.

Oh, I better go faster than thank you.

I get going on transit.

Route four, really no changes from what it's operating like today.

Route five was one where we looked at, you know,

changing its terminus there to just still running the same area it does, but had two options, one where it ends up Barracks Road like it currently does today, one where it's extended to UVA Hospital so you get that extra service, that extra connectivity between UVA Hospital and the US 29 corridor.

Route 6 was one of the changes that Garland asked that we looked for to get service on First Street South.

So that's what's reflected here.

7, Route 7, that's a key route, one of the highest ridership routes for CAT.

So we want to make sure that stays as a strong route and extend it up to the Walmart.

Weekdays.

Route 8 was a proposal we had here where providing some crosstown connectivity between Willoughby Square and the US 29 corridor without people having to go downtown to make that travel movement.

So using 9th Street, 10th Street, Preston Avenue to have a new crosstown route.

And Route 9, we had two options here.

It's one of the poorer performing routes where the second option we had was to try to strengthen it was to connect Route 9 to the US 29 corridor to a major destination at its end point.

Route 10 operates out into the county across the river.

So we try to do some cleanup of the alignment there.

And this is one where if it's possible to afford it, we'd love to see 30 minute all day service in this corridor as well.

That's okay.

Route 11.

goes up Rio Road to Fashion Square Mall.

And we were asked to look at modifying this so that it can serve the center at Belvedere.

And so unfortunately we can only do it one direction because there's not a traffic signal at Rio Road and Belvedere Boulevard, but it's near the end of line.

So at least we provide that service that's been requested.

and then the trolley, getting it back to 15 minute frequencies, getting it back running on the Cormac Road through the UVA campus is a high priority.

So I've got a map here that just shows kind of what the lower and upper limit networks would look like.

I think the thing to maybe focus on is the green.

Any alignment you show that you see on green

A route that's operating at 15 or 20 minute service, so high frequency service.

So you can see that the upper limit has more of that.

And then there's also more red 30 minute frequencies in that upper limit as well.

and I'm really short on time here, but we did look at transit accessibility here.

So that lower limit has some marginal improvements there in terms of accessibility, particularly for 7% improvement for people that would have access to 30 minute or better service.

That upper limit does a little bit better where that, especially weekend service and 30 minute or better service.

and then looking at cost.

Again, that lower limit was cost neutral from pre-COVID levels.

The upper limit was a 27% increase.

And this is just kind of showing that split between city and county there.

So this is a lower limit proposal where basically there's a little bit of shift of dollars to the county, extra cost of the county and a little bit of savings to the city.

The upper limit, both the city and county, there's additional costs to be able to do something like what's proposed in that upper limit.

Okay, let me open it up for questions, folks.

And I can see you again.

The only other question I have is I'm trying to set up some 2-1-1s so I can actually work, go through this in more detail with council members.

Okay, great.

All right.

County bus services and, you know, I don't want to belabor it and I can talk to you more offline.

I don't think that work session would be able to get to this level of detail.

I expect that that maybe could come at a different time.

It's really more about

you know, landing the budget and kind of moving forward for, you know, in the near term.

Sure.

And I understand that.

I just think it's going to be important as we move forward for supervisors to be able to look at the districts and have to be a whole nother, another meeting.

All right.

Any other comments or questions?

This was really very informative.

I really appreciate it.

This is more data than I've had on ridership.

And I get it's just taken a while, but thank you very much.

And I saw Karen nodding her head as well too.

Yeah, it took a little while.

Just had to get the data first, right?

Well, I mean, it was designed for us to show you what we are capable of doing.

Right.

Not necessarily using that as the pure.

But I was looking at the data way early on in the presentation and thinking, well, but anyway, it's all good.

All right.

So, I think if there are no more questions, we really,

Today, we had not planned for our usual round robin because we knew this was going to take a while.

I know that's one of our my favorites, but we are not going to do that today.

So I'm hearing no objections then.

We will be coming back on March the 25th and Jessica at that meeting will be presenting to us because we're going to have to get this, the grant, the regional partnership piece locked down.

So she'll be bringing something back at the 25th meeting and Jessica, is there anything else that we're looking forward to at that meeting?

No, not yet.

That's all good.

So Garland will send out this presentation.

And with that, I'm going to adjourn this meeting to March the 25th.

And thank you for joining us.

It's all good.

Bye bye.