Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   5/27/2021

I guess we're glad it's being recorded.

All right, so let me figure out where I was here.

I'll just start fresh.

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 for 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 and in accordance with virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01 of the Virginia State Budget House Bill 29, effective April 24, 2020.

The meeting will be recorded and made available to the public at tjpdc.org.

And the next order of business is to take our official attendance.

Jessica, could you call folks' names out for me, please?

I'm here.

Welcome, Kendall.

Garland Williams.

Karen Davis.

Jim Foley.

She just had a computer issue and got logged off.

Sarah Pennington.

Sally Lebeau.

Peter Thompson couldn't join us today and that's everyone.

Thanks, Diana.

And let me just ask, Chuck Proctor is not on yet, Jessica, is he?

No, he is not.

All right, we're going to see if we can adjust the agenda if that works for folks, because Karen and Jim have to leave early.

So what I'd love to do is to move up the fuel update after Wood Hudson's presentation, if it works for Chuck when he gets here.

And then so we'll just move the fuel update earlier and then continue after that.

And that lets Karen and Jim participate, if there are no objections with that change.

And I see B just signed on.

So we have B now.

All right, welcome.

Good.

So with that, the first item on our agenda, as always, are matters from the public.

A limit of three minutes per speaker.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Susan Cruz, and I'm the Executive Director of the Community Climate Collaborative.

and I haven't been able to come to a lot of these meetings, but I want you to know how much I appreciate your efforts to work toward greater coordination of our transportation planning in our community.

Both the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County have set ambitious targets to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

To accomplish these goals, reducing emissions from transportation is critical.

27% of Charlottesville's emissions and 48% of Albemarle County's emissions come from transportation or more specifically from the cars we drive.

Transportation is also one of the largest expenses that households face in our community after housing and its associated energy costs.

The average amount spent by a middle income family can be 20% of income on transportation.

And the average amount spent by a lower income family can be 30% of income on transportation.

So, you know, C3, we really believe that we can address both community climate emissions and cost burdens by families.

by investing and expanding our transit in our community with a focus on service to members of our community with the highest cost burden and the least efficient vehicles.

It is far more effective from a climate perspective to replace a car driver who has a more expensive to operate car that requires more fuel with a bus rider than to replace a person who has a more efficient vehicle, a hybrid driver, an electric vehicle driver with a transit rider.

So we really, we're actually doing some research on this topic right now and we're going to be releasing our report in July and really looking at those intersections of where expanding service and our community can have the greatest economic impact, social impact, and climate impacts.

Transit expansion, you know, also one of the other things we're looking at in our study is we did a broad community survey and conducted some focus groups.

Personally, I started working to use CAT as my major mode of transportation for work back in 2019.

I love the bus service.

I love my route.

My major problem is that it doesn't run frequently enough.

And it is not reliable enough for me to plan departure from work to come back home in the evening.

And we heard through our focus groups, many folks having trouble accessing bus stops, having to cross multiple lanes of 29 to reach safe bus stops.

And also members of our community, Spanish speaking members of our community who cannot

use bus service to reach their preferred church services that are conducted in Spanish on Sundays.

So there are some real issues of access in our community that we need to fix and expanding transit and focusing on expanding transit and modernizing transit and its fuel sourcing through electrification to get us ready for carbon neutrality is just critical.

Sorry, sorry.

I think, do we have another speaker?

I think I saw, there we go.

Can you identify yourself?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm Randy Salzman, not Jean Linke.

My computer doesn't have good audio, so I'm using my wife's Jean Linke.

I want to, first of all, thank you for letting me talk to you briefly.

And secondly, I will be trying to talk to several of you all individually.

and I want to relate specifically to what Ms. Cruz says.

We need to understand why people take the bus or don't take the bus, why people bicycle or don't bicycle, why people drive or don't drive.

And there is another car culture which has done this exceptionally well and that car culture is Australia where they have just as high a per capita car ownership as we do in the United States.

they have done over the last 15 years had tremendous effects of decreasing vehicle kilometers traveled about 14%.

And to give you an idea, this is better than the United States did last year when our economy collapsed during the COVID and about three times the decrease in vehicle miles traveled that took place in the 2008 gasoline crisis.

And I think we can adapt that program and right now,

With the Biden administration, with the two new czars, Gina McCarthy and John Kerry, and the most innovative transportation secretary probably ever, Pete Buttigieg, we are in the point where we could go out, we being Albemarle and Charlottesville, and go after a federal grant which would allow us to take this Travel Smart operation in Australia, adapt it to the wonderful things that are being done in Rideshare,

and really understand how people use, don't use and then spend the money on the infrastructure that will help more people use.

To give you an idea of how effective this has been in Perth, it's Western Australia.

In the early 80s, they were totally destroying, they were eliminating commuter rail and then they started this program and now they've done the entire Perth, Western Australia area.

and they built a new commuter rail.

It had a 9-0, 90% approval ratings when it opened.

It was a decade after that.

In Melbourne, on the other side of the country, in Brisbane, especially in Brisbane, they have done this with over 300,000 families.

It's been tremendously effective.

And what I'm coming to you as an idea is right now is the time to go after a grant.

I would love to spend 30 minutes of your time

and explain to you how it works and how we can adapt it here for our community and lead America.

It has been tried in four American cities in a George Bush, the Sun, believe it or not, George Bush, the Sun pilot in 2004, 2005.

It found an 8% decrease in vehicle miles traveled in only six weeks.

Phenomenal effort at that particular time.

So right now, because of the stars aligning at the federal level, we, this area, could go after a grant that would be the leadership for helping America really do what Ms. Cruz has just talked about, understand the individuals and how we can help them change as opposed to

Thank you.

Thank you, Randy.

I appreciate it.

And I appreciate both of you coming today.

It was great to hear from you.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else, Jessica?

Anyone else?

Is there anyone else from the public?

No.

All right.

Thank you both for coming.

Try to get me on your schedule.

The next item on our agenda are our meeting minutes and we do need to vote on the minutes.

I will entertain any edits or corrections or a motion to approve.

A motion to approve our minutes would be great.

So moved.

Thank you, Bea.

Second from Randy.

Thank you.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Any opposed?

Aye.

Any abstentions?

I want to abstain.

I left after we're doing item six, so I'm not okay.

Great, thank you.

So Nikai is abstaining.

Any other abstentions from the voting members?

All right, so we have the minutes from April are approved.

Next item on our agenda, Jessica, is the member spotlight.

Yeah, so really briefly, we just want to give this partnership the opportunity to get to know each other in a more personal way.

So we're going to take turns.

We're going to start with Sarah Pennington and Sandy Shackelford.

And this is just a really brief couple of minutes opportunity for them to share their

A happy transit memory, what they're excited about working on with regards to transit right now and what about transit they're most excited about looking into the future.

So I hope that all of you will be excited to share your own backgrounds at some point in the future.

It doesn't have to be a big thing.

I guess I will start.

So many of you, I do know, but just in case, I'm Sarah Pennington.

I am the TDM program manager at the TJPBC, which oversees the Rideshare program that we have here.

I have been with the PDC, it will be 11 years come August, time flies.

And that was pretty much my introduction into TDM, Transportation Demand Management.

and the transportation arena in general.

My background is in public relations, communications and marketing, which was a really good fit for the Rideshare program in the sense that a lot of it is coordinating and communicating with folks and getting the word out.

One of the things I love most about working for Rideshare and working in the transportation sector is all of the partnerships

that come together.

You know, transportation doesn't just work in a silo.

There are so many moving parts and moving pieces and the more that we can work together and band together to help each other out, the better.

You know, it's pretty rare that I don't have a week that goes by where I'm not referring someone to different transportation options other than the carpooling and vanpooling coordination that Rideshare does.

So I'm referring folks to CAD and referring folks to Jaunt.

And then of course with RideShare, anyone who's using alternative forms of transportation to get to and from work can also be part of our guaranteed ride home program, which I think is a huge

benefit for folks who are looking to get out of their cars.

It's a hard behavior to get to get for people to change.

And then of course the big thing in this last bit of the pandemic is this tiny little portion of what I did, called telework.

has somehow morphed into a large part of our programming at Rideshare.

And even prior to the pandemic, it was actually the fastest growing alternative working commute.

So that has now changed the landscape as well.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity coming out of the pandemic to reach people as they are changing their lives and changing their behaviors to potentially come back to work.

Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you.

All right, I'm going to try to set the bar really low so whoever goes next doesn't feel any pressure to put on any sort of major production to develop their spotlight.

My name is Sandy Shackelford.

I'm the Director of Planning and Transportation for the TJPDC.

Before I worked at the PDC, I've been here for about two years now.

I worked in local government for, oh goodness, close to 10 years, 11 years, something like that, and then moved to the PDC.

I actually got my professional start though doing

Transportation Policy Research for the American Trucking Associations.

So I'm kind of back to where I started a little bit doing more research focused and planning focused work versus the local government regulation type of things I was doing for the local governments.

My background is in policy.

I'd probably say that I have a skill set that can be applied very broadly across a lot of policy areas, but I think my real interests and the things I get excited about are being able to work in terms of building consensus and finding practical solutions to problems.

I think that's something that I really like to be able to work with

multiple stakeholders to really start fitting pieces together and finding creative solutions to challenges.

So that's something that I'm really excited about with the transit opportunities that are happening right now is being able to hear from the community and start working with you all to see how everybody can come together to find the right opportunities to meet the needs of the community.

I will say just as far as personal experience with transit, just to give you guys a fun little story.

I went to Georgia Tech, so I rode, I used the MARTA system, that's their public transit system, in Atlanta quite a bit, but that system is very linear.

They really only have a couple tracks and they go in two different directions and there's a central hub, so it was really easy to use.

You couldn't get to a lot of places using just the train, but that one was really easy.

So I took a work trip early on in my career to Boston which had a much different system and I went to meet a friend that lived there and coming back I couldn't remember what stop to get off on and it was really late at night and I got off on the wrong stop and I remember wandering around

For a long time, not really knowing exactly where I was before GPS was as up to date as it was.

So that was one scary story.

But a couple years later, I went up to meet a friend in New York for the New York City Marathon.

Great.

Very interesting about the GPS technology and the transit.

That's great.

Thank you ladies, both of you very much.

The next item on our agenda is the Smart Scale Opportunities for Transit, and Wood Hudson is going to be the presenter, and Wood, welcome back.

Oh, sorry, I was on mute.

I'm trying to figure out how to share.

I have like nine screens running today, so bear with me a second.

Can you all see the correct slide deck and not like the slide note screen?

No, we're good.

Yeah.

So, well, thank you guys for having me out to present on SmartScale.

I'm one of the transit planners here at the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

And as Diana alluded to before, I used to work at TJPDC, so I am well versed in the transit issues and transit discussions that have been going on in the Charlottesville community for a long time.

I'm going to run through another short presentation today and try to give you all a bit of an overview of how transit projects can fit into kind of the smart scale rubric.

I'll be covering kind of a basic introduction to smart scale.

I do apologize for some folks, especially the planners.

This is probably going to be a bit repetitive.

We heavily borrowed from OIP's kind of standard slide deck on SmartScale.

For other folks, it's going to be some new and really good information.

I'll then go into some details regarding how a SmartScale application can be developed, some of the data requirements, the scoring methodology that we use to evaluate transit projects, and then I'll kind of touch on some

Example transit projects from the past round of SmartScale.

And then I'll pause and kind of provide a little bit of time for folks to ask questions.

So without further ado, what is SmartScale?

SmartScale seeks to invest limited tax dollars in the right projects that meet the most critical transportation needs through a database prioritization process.

Projects are evaluated on a uniform set of measures that are applicable statewide.

These being safety, congestion mitigation, accessibility, land use, environmental quality, economic development.

These measures are valued with different weights depending on an applicant's category type and area, which often mirror regional priorities.

For example, the congestion mitigation factor may be weighted the heaviest

in one area category, while in another it may be economic development scores that have the greatest weight in the SmartScale scoring rubric.

SmartScale is a biannual process that follows the project development submission scoring and selection kind of procedure.

After project selection, approximately one year lapses before intake period begins again.

Applicants are generally encouraged to use that kind of one year off year to kind of develop their projects.

You know, they can reach out to us for technical assistance.

I know VDOT does provide some technical assistance as well.

Just kind of an FYI, round five intake will begin in March of 2022, which seems like a long way off, but really in terms of developing projects that can, you know, go in a flash.

For transit projects, there's some general categories of eligibility for the funding.

Transit projects can either be a standalone transit specific application or transit may be a component of a larger multimodal or roadway focused project.

We refer to those as transit primary or transit secondary applications.

The main requirement of all

of an eligible transit application is it needs to be capital in nature.

And the improvement needs to focus on kind of like a rider focused improvement.

Generally, it's, you know, funding something like a facility that's really just to meet like a state of good repair is not something that tends to be eligible for smart scale.

Here's some examples of eligible projects.

Rolling Stock for new or expanded service, transfer stations and facilities, rail infrastructure, transit technology, passenger amenities, and bus only lanes and facilities.

Generally eligible applicants fall into one of the following categories, public transit agencies, MPOs,

and planning district commissions and then county cities and towns and other political subdivisions of the Commonwealth.

If somebody is applying for a transit project or a transit component and is not a transit agency, they do need to get a letter of support from the transit agency stating that that transit agency is in support of the project and has available operating funds to operate that

application when they move forward.

And that's kind of just a footnote in an FYI, because we do have a fair number of transit focused projects that come from localities.

So when you are developing a transit application, there are some very specific data requirements that we need to be able to adequately evaluate the project.

We need an existing inventory of stop level and route level ridership for impacted stops and routes.

If it's a new service, there's some additional components that come with that.

We need route geographies.

We try to get that in a form that we can utilize, not just like a highlighter line on a map, but either like the spatial GIS data,

GTFS or kind of other standard formats.

The cost of the transit slash rail features.

Surprisingly, this is a one of the one of the places where we do see some issues is folks have baked the transit cost into a larger project cost because it can end up being, you know, like one or 2% of like a large streetscaping project.

But we do need to be able to

identify and see those costs in an estimate to be able to clearly evaluate and benchmark those.

When we see new transit, there are some additional requirements.

We now require a feasibility study that includes ridership projection, a new route alignment, a proposed schedule, and that letter of support saying that the agency is committed to operating the new service

and has operating funds available to do so.

Integrating transit components into roadway projects.

This is probably the most common type of application that we see, especially in round four.

There were, I'm going to guess and say we had over 35 applications that included a transit component.

These applications can be very successful because transit components can be

kind of an overall, a very cost effective solution and thus increase the overall project score because of that reduction in congestion on the roadway.

A couple things about doing these transit secondary type projects.

The transit feature must be contiguous with the overall project improvements.

Essentially, if you're doing a streetscaping project,

on road A.

You can't go and say, oh, but we're going to put in shelters and benches on road B, which is like three blocks away.

They have to be directly contiguous.

Again, cost must be included and we must be able to identify the transit specific components on kind of all of the spec sheets and the designs and things like that.

Some really common types of projects that fit this category are

passenger amenities, benches and shelters, sidewalk connectivity to transit stops.

These are all things that we saw in round four and tend to do very well because they can be rather low cost in nature.

We've also seen some bus only lanes, BRT station expansion, bus pull outs, which is

essentially a small pocket lane on like a mainline roadway where a bus can pull out and get out of the way of the flow of traffic and then some transit signal priority where a corridor is being retrofitted, well signals in a corridor are being retrofitted and they add technology in that particular corridor to allow things like transit vehicle preemption or kind of dynamic signalization in the corridor to optimize

transit vehicle flow.

Scoring, so when a transit project comes in, the primary area that DRPT focuses on is the congestion mitigation factor.

Kind of an overview of that factor, project congestion mitigation scores are derived from two measures.

50% of the score is from an increase in person throughput

and another 50% of that score is reduction in person hours of delay.

The way transit works is an increase in transit ridership removes passenger car trips from the roadway due to mode shift, resulting in an increased person throughput and a reduction in person hours of delay.

This is why it's really important that when a transit application is submitted that we have good quality existing ridership data

so that we can do that delta calculation and come up with that reduction in person hour delay, increasing person throughput.

We internally QC all of our projects.

Transit benefits are additionally scored for accessibility and safety factor areas.

That's carried out by the OIP scoring team.

They use a variety of different

products that are similar or used to their roadway scoring metrics for that.

Then projects receive a final score based on the results from other factor areas and factor weighting.

Final smart scale score is then derived from the benefit and the smart scale cost slash funding request.

This is where we always like to point out to point out that smart scale is on 100% funding pot.

However,

Additional dollars placed on projects can have an impact on that final project SmartScale score by reducing the amount that the project is requesting from the SmartScale pot.

So this next slide is really a comparison between kind of the two major funding pathways for transit capital projects.

SmartScale that we've kind of touched on

and then our DRPT Merit Capital Program.

So I'll just kind of run through the comparison between the two programs.

SmartScale is, has a much more open type of project that can be applied for roadway, transit, rail and TDM.

DRPT's Merit Capital Program is limited to transit only projects, funding timeline,

SmartScale funds are generally programmed four to six years following the SIP adoption.

So this can, this is very different than the merit program for DRPT where funds are available July 1st immediately following SIP adoption.

Local match requirements, none for SmartScale.

For the DRPT merit program, at least 4%.

State of Good Repair projects are not eligible for SmartScale but are eligible for DRPT.

Support vehicle eligibility is not something that you can apply for in SmartScale but is something that we do fund through the DRPT Merit Capital Program.

Funding rates fully funded when a select project is funded essentially.

The DRPT program, it's up to 68% for minor enhancement and state of good repair project and up to 50% for major expansion.

And the DRPT one generally is only allocating state resources, whereas SmartScale might be a combination of different funding resources.

So I'm going to run through two sample projects from round four SmartScale.

The first one is one of our transit only applications.

This was a GRTC application, Greater Richmond Transit Company, for new articulated buses to serve the BRT route.

The data that the applicant provided included existing weekday ridership, proposed route alignment and schedule, the cost of the new transit vehicles, and the ridership growth rate.

Additional data that we utilized in the evaluation process included passenger miles traveled, unlinked passenger trips, and annual average weekday daily traffic.

Another project was the West Main Street Skate Project Phase 3, 8th Street to northwest to Roosevelt Brown.

Probably a project that is very familiar to folks on this call.

This was a bike and pedestrian with secondary transit features.

Data provided included existing stop level ridership for stops receiving a shelter, shelter costs, shelter location was clearly shown on the project sketch, route geography for all routes that utilize these new shelters.

Additional data that we used was passenger miles traveled, unlinked passenger trips, and annual average weekday

Some really good resources as you all consider transit applications, the smart scale technical guide, the local transit development plans for Cat and John, and previously funded smart scale projects.

The public dashboard allows you to

do a project search and you can kind of see what other people have applied for, how they've structured their applications and kind of how they fared the various rounds of smart scale.

Additionally, DRPT transit staff is available to do some technical support and kind of help you all like envision your project and

figure out what resources are needed.

And lastly, DRPT does have a technical assistance funding program.

This is we call it TA.

It is a 50-50 grant program and smart scale readiness and application development is an eligible category for that funding stream.

And with that, I'll kind of switch over to questions mode and leave up the contact information for

myself and the entire planning team.

I also have on the line my colleague Taylor Jenkins.

And Wood, thank you very much.

That was a great presentation.

That would be great.

And so we'll open it up for questions if anyone has a question.

Of course, I can't see any hands or anything, Jessica.

So why don't you would why don't you show us everybody?

Why don't you take your presentation down so we can see faces that might help.

That was a great presentation.

Hey Wood, this is Christine.

They can be used, you know, if you were doing a, if you needed a study or something, that is an eligible expense for a TA application.

It's pretty, pretty permissive what can be funded through TA.

So if there was something that you had in mind,

I would suggest that you just get in contact and we can kind of discuss and see if it would be an exact fit or how to shape it into something that might be a fit for the program.

Wood, we learned that the hard way.

One should never apply for smart scale funding when there's a billion dollar tunnel up for funding.

All right.

With that, if there are no questions, I'm sure Wood would be happy if you emailed in questions that you might have and we'll get your presentation and share it with everybody.

Thank you.

And I am going to ask.

Thank you, Wood.

If we can just adjust the agenda a little bit because both Karen and Jim have to leave.

So if we could move down to the fuel update, and I understand from Jessica that Chuck Proctor had something that came up at the last minute, so we'll have to catch him at another meeting, I believe, Jessica.

So with that fuel update, what we were asking for, given the

The situation that happened with the colonial pipeline.

We were curious as to how they thought it would be interesting to just chat for a minute to how that played out in our local community with the gas shortage.

Thank you.

Well, I have to say it really showed a vulnerability that we didn't realize we had.

We don't have any tanks or backup gas.

And so we are definitely at the mercy of the commercial

gas structure.

And also we cover such a large regional area.

That's one of the reasons we have that type of structure.

So it did impact our services.

We did decide to reduce down to critical service only, critical ADA, critical medical trips in the rural areas.

And we had to cancel our connect services, which

We really hate to do, but got them back up and running a couple of days later.

We worked cooperatively.

We have staff everywhere, of course, drivers everywhere communicating where fuel might have gotten restocked.

And of course, now we all have Gas Buddy on our phones, and we're communicating about that.

I did immediately reach out, and it

Of course, you know, my community transit partners all use diesel.

So they they offered up, you know, help, but they didn't have much help to offer.

However, you know,

Thanks to Garland and the city.

We did start some early discussions about having something in place for an emergency like this in the future.

And it's something that my staff are starting to work on in terms of getting daily consumption broken out into the different areas of our service, which we will be able to, excuse me, pull together.

and then I think by locality, just deciding in an emergency like that, you know, what level of service would you want to have available from Jaunt and then kind of figuring out how many gallons that is and what the cost would be, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think that that would be a really great layer of protection and support for our system to have in place in the future.

We did, of course, put out our electric vehicle.

Usually everyone says,

You know, what if the grid goes down, your electric vehicles don't run?

No one expected gas to be disrupted.

Great.

Are there any questions for Karen?

B.

Yes, thank you, Karen.

And what are you thinking of?

Just hopefully accessing the tanks already available, the supply already available in the localities themselves.

Most localities will have reserves for especially emergency vehicles, et cetera.

So just accessing that, just letting them know that we want to be part of the discussion.

And like I said, it's maybe all localities, the critical, medical is just all they want to sustain through a period of time like that, which would be certainly a smaller amount of fuel than we normally use.

Have you reached out to the two new Wawa stations because they seem to be a really good community

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, it really revealed some unique supply chains.

Costco has its own resources.

It was able to say completely fueled during the event or for the most part.

All right, with that, let me jump down to Jim because I know you have to leave early too.

Sure.

Yeah, I'm driving.

I pulled over.

Yeah, so my department, the transportation department, we manage the seven fuel tanks that are owned by the county.

Four of those tanks are unleaded and three are diesel.

My department uses almost all diesel and other county vehicles use almost all unleaded to include emergency vehicles.

So in working with Trevor and his folks,

We were able to stay at acceptable levels the whole time.

I think it really helped us that we did an RFP a couple years ago.

So we had a dedicated vendor who prioritized delivering to us.

So our main focus was to make sure emergency vehicles were

We were able to get fuel for their vehicles.

And we were able to procure probably, I'm going to guess about four trucks in the last couple of weeks.

So we received 8,500 gallons of unleaded last night and

We feel like we're out of the woods right now.

Great.

Any questions for Jim?

Diana, can I add to that?

Broader than just the impact on school transportation, but as Jim mentioned, we essentially formed an incident management team.

We didn't formally do that, but we had

folks from building services, VMF, Jim and William Shifflett who did a great job communicating along with facilities, PD, our communications office and the sheriff's department.

And we met about every three days when the panic first hit.

We communicated out organizationally that everybody that could work from home should work from home.

and also we stood down any non-essential travel for normal county business.

And we, you know, we extended that, you know, a week and a half or so, folks started coming back kind of once supplies were more readily available, folks that had been working out of the offices started coming back.

But it wasn't until actually just today that we've

We have kind of gone back to normal non-essential travel.

So DSS, PD, facilities, you know, all of those entities that didn't, that had some discretionary trips, those were stood down to prioritize and to minimize our use.

So that was a whole really county effort that rallied around this interesting episode that we had.

Right.

That's great, Trevor.

All right.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Sure.

So CAT and city schools, we didn't really have any issues.

We were able to get fuel.

It was about a day delay right before the

The pipeline issue became a real issue.

We had already put in for an additional ore of diesel fuel, so it was our regular system that just basically bumped it up a couple of days.

And on the gasoline side, the city fleet management and public works basically shifted the majority of their filling to police, fire, and school bus in transit.

So that made it a priority.

Like I said, we worked with Karen to see if we could try to work out something with her.

That was kind of a priority because part of what she does is our ADA, which is required.

So we wanted to make sure she had fuel to be able to do that.

Any questions for Garland?

Thanks, Garland.

Sure.

Yeah, essentially the same as Garland.

We just got lucky.

It wasn't any great like strategic planning or anything.

We just got lucky with our fuel delivery in that it hit, our diesel delivery especially, that it hit right before this whole pipeline thing.

And so we're currently burning about 500 gallons of diesel a day.

and our below ground tank holds 10,000 gallons.

So we had a two week stretch of wiggle room and we had just gotten a fresh load about three days prior.

So it could have been a much bigger issue for us given slightly different timing.

Okay, any questions?

I guess we have five transit providers in this community, so I guess you get into a bad situation.

Working together is a real positive if you can, right?

For a second there, it felt like we were going to live the plot of Mad Max, though.

All right, any other questions for Kendall?

That's great.

All right, then we'll move back.

Thanks, Diana.

So I just will briefly speak about these.

So for our regional transit vision plan, a lot of that technical and public engagement work is going to be done by consultants.

So we put out an invitation for proposals and we received three truly excellent proposals from three different consulting firms.

The selection committee is in the process of reviewing those.

And I expect that we'll be able to announce who we're going with at our next RTP meeting.

So that's it for that update.

And then the Abner county transit expansion study.

So we have already given a notice to proceed to the Michael Baker Foursquare team.

We're currently working on the details of the public engagement plan.

We are planning our first public engagement session for that project in late July or early August.

They're going to finish up all of the needs assessment work before they bring that information to the public and then seek public input.

Yep, Trevor.

Thanks.

Really just sharing for those that are on the study.

Great.

So we need to make sure we make that connection.

And I also talked to Roger Johnson, the Albemarle County Economic Development Director, and he would like to have the opportunity to connect as well through his office.

So I just don't want to forget, this is a good time to remind myself to say that to you, Jessica.

So we want to put Roger Johnson in the economic development group for that Albemarle County grant.

Any other

Any questions for Jessica on those two grants?

They're moving forward, which is good news.

Okay.

All right.

Then the next item, I think Lucinda, this is your time to shine.

We have the tip update.

Now I'm trying to find Lucinda.

Yeah, thanks, Diana.

So in your packet, there's three memos and we went over the first two memos in the April meeting.

So I'm just going to go over the third memo.

And this is just an addition.

There's two adjustments that were made.

So they're not voted on by the policy board.

They're just adjustments and their additions to operating funds for Kat and John.

Kat increased the operating funds about 17 and a half, a little over 17 and a half million dollars and John's operating funds were increased a little over half a million dollars.

I did notice, and am I on the right place?

I'm looking because some of this is

You know, we're all new at this.

I'm looking at the Jaunt, and I think this is the new tip block.

Is that correct?

And it looks like Jaunt was purchasing, I was just trying to wrap my head around this, six electric buses in 21, in 22, six electric buses, 23, 10, and then in 24, 15 electric buses.

That was the one that we talked about in April.

I don't have it up.

It's a John question.

Oh, I'm sorry, Karen.

That's OK.

I believe that that was planning that had been done by our previous CEO.

He was anticipating purchasing that many

in those fiscal years, but now we're hoping to conduct a study and then purchase the electric vehicles off of the state contract going forward.

So just a slightly different plan with the same goal.

So when those buses were purchased, they weren't electric buses, they were gasoline.

Yeah, I just wanted to point it out because I thought it was great news.

Um, were there any questions about to Lucinda for the tip?

Lucinda, was that it for you?

Or did you have something else you wanted to show us?

It was just those two adjustments.

Okay.

Yeah, just real quickly.

Due to a scheduled joint session between the Charlottesville City Council and School Board, we amended the MPO Policy Board agenda for last night's meeting.

So the only thing that the Policy Board did last night was they voted on the adoption of the Unified Planning Work Program.

Jessica has included all that information in your packets.

There is one point of clarification that I want to make in that there's an error in the table that shows the financial breakdown.

So what was actually voted on by the MPO Policy Board is under Task 2 on the table that's in your memo for the Long Range Transportation Planning section.

The climate action initiatives for transportation planning, that ended up being a total of $30,000.

And so the balance from that $50,684 ended up being added to the on-call services line item.

So what the policy board had voted on is that they wanted us to focus on

coming up with some strategies on how to incorporate climate action planning considerations into our long range transportation plan.

So we're going to focus on that.

And then they wanted to set aside the balance of that $50,000 total

in order to have it available for an initiative that may not be identified at that point.

Based on some of the conversations we're having with VDOT as well as from the city and the county about their priorities, it sounds like there's probably going to be a list of things that we're going to have to choose from.

So I'm pretty confident that that money is going to be programmed within the first three or four months of the year.

It's just it hasn't been identified right now.

But that was adopted at the policy board meeting last night.

So that work program has been sent to Wood to check our DRPT and VDOT contacts as the final adopted copy and it will be up on our website.

The other thing I want to mention is that we are continuing to discuss our smart scale projects.

We'll go back to revisit those.

If anybody's interested in attending, we're going to have an extra MPO meeting in June.

Normally the MPO Policy Board meets every other month, but because we had so much on the agenda, we couldn't just put everything off this month to accommodate the schedule.

So we're going to have a meeting on June 23rd.

with the policy board where we'll be talking about our smart scale projects and going through the rest of the business.

There are a couple of agenda items that might be of interest to some of you all.

There are some resolutions for the MPO Policy Board to support some local requests for funding through the Transportation Alternatives Program and the Safe Routes to School Program.

So we'll have that on the agenda next month.

just for the policy board to provide their support for those projects.

And I think the other thing that we'll briefly talk about is the PDC will be considering an application for a RAISE grant to look at a planning study for the Amtrak station.

That's great.

So, um, maybe this group would be this group would be interested in receiving.

Sure.

Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.

Maybe some folks might be interested.

That'd be great.

All right.

Any questions for Sandy?

No questions.

All right.

And I don't think, Jessica, I've missed anything.

Am I running on track here?

Okay, I just want to make sure when I moved around that I didn't want to skip anything.

So our transit provider updates.

We did a little bit of an update about the fuel shortage, but let's do a round robin again and see if there's anything else you want to tell us about.

Okay, thank you.

So I know you highlighted on the tip part about junk, but I wanted to sing Cat's praises a little bit too.

We were able to get in $17 million, which means we've got six expansion vehicles and it's a difficult time for funding and we were able to

I just wanted to point out that we have a lot of work to do to improve our case with the state and saying that it's a dedicated need for us to do so.

That's really big for CAT, concerned that we have reliability issues with some of our vehicles now.

Can you point me to the page for that and I'll go back and look at it.

I actually have to leave in a little bit, so I'm just going to begin.

I just wanted to make sure that a couple other things that we're working on and I just that the APC component is a done deal for us now.

We have executed an agreement so we can actually move forward UTA, which is the same provider that does the automatic passenger counters for University Transit is the one who won the bid.

That's huge.

So that allows us to potentially share data, which is really good to allow us to see time, date stamp, you name it.

We're going to be able to do a lot of slicing and dicing here very soon as soon as we get ours then validated and work through the process.

All of this will help us in future grant opportunities because that's a really necessary component.

The state wants to see route level detail on and off counts at stop level.

So having the APCs is a big step for us to being able to provide the state with a level of

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So that's all good news.

Great news.

Yeah, that's great.

All right.

Anything else?

I don't have any newer pressing news.

We're going to be working through our sort of route structure post-COVID to start up with the fall semester in late August.

All right, great.

Yeah, I stayed just so I could participate, then I got to go.

Yeah, just a couple of quick things.

We had a really terrific visit from TJPDC, Christine's staff.

came out to ride a bus and tour the facility and check out some of the things that initiatives we have coming.

I thought it was a great visit.

It gave us a chance for all the staff to get to know each other.

And so we welcome anyone, anytime.

Coming out of that, Steven Johnson, our transit manager, planning manager, participated in a panel about transportation and housing, and so he had a great experience.

I thought he did a terrific job.

After his presentation, it was so effective.

He's so well-spoken.

I got a call from UVA Foundation talking about a service we had done for them that right now it's discontinued, Park Connect.

And he was so well-spoken that they called me saying, hey, you know, On Demand could actually meet our need better than the model that we were using.

And I thought, that's terrific.

A great thing for us to have a conversation with them and explore.

I think the other two things that were of interest recently was both the Fralin Museum and the Botanical Gardens reached out to us to better understand John's services and how we can help support the effort to make those two community resources more

accessible to the community.

And, you know, Fralin, we were talking right now, we're free, they're free.

It seems like a great conversation to have with the community.

Like, why not go to the museum and find out what you can do there?

And they put in some structure to make it more accessible.

So of course, the ADA is part of our service, and they reopened that renovation.

we'll be doing some press releases around that too about the service we can provide.

I will agree with you.

Steven did a great job on that panel.

I participated in that and it was a fascinating discussion.

And Jessica, could you make available the way the link or however that this group could find that podcast or however it's stored and just to be able to find it and listen

It was, I'm trying to remember, was it an hour and a half or an hour?

Just an hour, I think, wasn't it?

But anyway, it was really interesting around affordable housing and transit, so it's good.

All right, have I covered, Jim Foley, I don't know if Jim's still there, I can't tell.

Jim, are you still driving?

Can you hear me?

Okay.

I don't know if it's... We may have to pass on this one, Jim.

I'm not sure where you are.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, but we're not getting you, Jim.

Technology is great, except when it's not.

We finished up with summer school to see if she could help.

Okay, we're hearing that we're going to be avoiding the drop-off and pick-up times at Albemarle High School, or no, Albemarle Public Schools, I guess, in general.

So, I think that's what we heard.

Anyway, I think with that, we have finished our agenda.

We're ending a little early, but my experience is that no one complains.

It is a gorgeous evening, so maybe we can all get outside and enjoy the weather.

And I really appreciate everybody participating.

It's great to see everybody and we will rally back around June the 24th will be our next meeting.

And thank you very much with that.

Unless someone wants to bring something up to the table, I'm happy to adjourn the meeting.

Going, going, gone.

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone.

Good night.