Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   12/2/2021

All right.

Well, welcome everybody to the Regional Transit Partnership meeting, the December meeting, which is we're meeting in a little different time.

And I'm glad to see everybody's calendar had it.

I was going to read it, but you're more than welcome to.

I have it right here in front of me.

I can read it and then you take attendance.

How about that?

We'll share it.

This meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings when the locality in which it is located

has declared a local state of emergency and the catastrophic nature of the emergency makes it impractical or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location and the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the discharge of its lawful purposes, duties, and responsibilities.

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

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

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

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

A recording of the meeting will be posted at the TJPDC.org website within 10 days of the meeting.

And with that, if you would call the attendance.

Okay.

Counselor Snook, City of Charlottesville.

Supervisor B. Loquisto-Curtley, Albemarle County.

Present.

Director Morgan, John Rorl.

I see you, you're on, he's here.

Mayor Walker, City of Charlottesville.

Present.

Ms. White, UVA Parking and Transportation.

I'm here also, thank you.

Do you want me to read the non-voting members as well?

Do we do that?

I'm muted.

Mr. Rigg, job staff.

Ms. LeBeau, UVA Hospital.

Ms. Pennington, Rideshare, Ms. Shackelford, Charlottesville, Albemarle, MPO.

I'm here.

Maybe Garland will be joining us soon.

All right, thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Before we move to matters from the public, I just want to take a minute to recognize that this is Nikaya's last meeting with us, I believe.

unless we have to call some weird meeting later in the month.

And it's also Jim Foley's last meeting.

So I just wanted to recognize you and thank you for your service and your work on our committee.

And we really appreciated both of you being here.

Nikaya, do you want to say anything?

Thank you.

I appreciate.

Just a shout out, transit is one of the areas that, you know, moving people around the city and attempting to figure out how to do that more efficiently and all the different aspects that it takes from how the, you know, whether the lights are running efficiently to make traffic flow better.

All those things are very interesting and if we're going to get to a place where our transit system is able to move people about in the ways that we imagine is possible, all of those things are going to.

So I've enjoyed learning about all the

Connectors between these meetings and all of the many meetings we've had in the city.

And I hope that the ultimate goal that we are all aspiring for in the regional partnerships and that is all laid out in an equitable fashion occurs.

Well, I remember, Nikkiah, when you and I first started working together on this committee and we talked about how important we both felt transit was to our community.

And you talked about how you had a lot of family members and friends that depended on trends.

And I also want to recognize Nikaya because she and I actually had numerous meetings hammering out the budget and the cost sharing, remember?

Which was really fun.

And I think we ended up doing a great job.

It worked out.

It was all good.

I enjoyed it very much.

And Jim is actually retiring.

Jim, would you like to say a few words?

No, it's been an honor to serve in this partnership.

And, Diane, I've really appreciated your gentle manner of leadership, not only through this committee, but previously as a school board member and as a member of the board of supervisors.

I think we're making some good progress.

I think it's important that all the major transportation providers in the district get together like we're doing and try to make a plan going forward.

And I will bring on my successor.

I may be able to attend the next meeting to introduce that person, but we'll see how that goes.

But it's been an honor serving with everyone and

Well, it works well that's great.

And you'll still keep your hand in and you'll still keep your commercial license.

That's right.

Well, maybe we'll see you then in January with your successor, depending on the timing.

Yeah, yeah, possibly.

Sure.

We we do not have anyone that signed up.

If somebody would like to comment now you can raise your hand.

Not seeing any takers.

So with that, we'll move on to approval of our meeting minutes.

These are the minutes from our September 23rd meeting and I would, if anybody has any minor edits, concerns, if not, I'll entertain a motion to approve.

I make a motion, we approve.

Is there a second?

Second from, and I didn't catch it.

There's so many of you on the screen, I'm sorry.

Who seconded it?

Okay, Hal seconded it then.

So all those in favor, please either say aye or raise your hand.

Aye.

Aye.

Any nos?

And any abstentions?

All right, we have our minutes approved.

And the next item is the member spotlight.

Well, so why don't you go first?

And we talk about transit and a little bit of our history in transit and why it's important to us.

Well, my interest in transit began on my first job out of graduate school was working for the American Bus Association.

I was fascinated by the dichotomy, if you will, of the members.

You had guys who were really poor, operated one or two buses, and then you had really wealthy families, and this was their family business.

It was pretty interesting.

And then after that, I went to work for a consulting firm and worked for the

a federal transit administration that they had a program called the entrepreneurial services program to try to get people interested in providing private people in providing public transit in their in their rural areas really.

And then I, out of that, I took a job with the Tax Cap Limousine and Paratransit Association and with various names since.

And so that was my job until I retired in 2018, so almost 40 years in transit.

And I guess I want to, what I want to do is actually learn more about John.

I mean, I've just been on the John board since in 2019, so there's still a lot to learn.

When I joined, we had one in-person meeting and then went to Zoom, so it was hard to get to know

and my fellow board members, much less about John.

And I do have a history with John back in the early in the 70s.

I actually came to visit Linda Wilson, who was then the executive founder, executive director of John.

And it was pretty amazing because they operate out of an old brick building and they actually had their mechanics, a shade tree mechanic.

He did the he worked on the buses in the in the like the field behind the building.

It was pretty, pretty interesting.

And then the question Lucinda said, what about, what's my outlook or what do I see about the future of transit?

And, you know, I think technology is the thing that is, you know, the technology, bringing more technology and electric vehicles and stuff, but it still comes down to the people.

It's finding the quality people.

And it's, you know, it's pretty interesting.

I used, I worked as a colleague, was Bill Millar, who was the head,

American Public Transportation Association for a number of years.

But he started off as a paratransit manager in Pittsburgh.

And he said, you know, it's amazing.

Paratransit drivers, it's considered an entry level position for big transit agency.

And then you want to work, you know, move your way up to drive the big buses.

But he said, you know, it's the most important job is the paratransit drivers.

He deals with the customers.

He has to be sensitive.

He has so much responsibility.

So I was always struck by that.

And so Lucinda did say, ask for a fun fact.

So my fun fact is that I am not addicted, but I love Hallmark Christmas movies.

And this time of year they're on all the time.

But I have a treat for you, if any of you do like Hallmark movies, on Saturday night at seven o'clock, Comedy Central is doing a spoof.

It's called the Clusterfuck Christmas, and it's a spoof of all

The parody of all the Hallmark movies and I've seen a trailer.

It is really hysterical, honestly.

And so it's really worth watching.

I'm going to put it on my calendar.

I will tell you that we had a Board of Supervisors meeting yesterday and of course they know six or eight, I don't know, however long.

And during one break I ran upstairs and Greg was watching exactly what you like.

One of those Hallmark Christmas movies.

So there are a lot of people that enjoy those movies as well.

And I guess it's my turn.

Just a little briefly, I grew up in Stanton.

My father was a small business person.

And Jim will appreciate this.

I will tell you that this is my kind of fun fact.

My first memory of

transit, well, not transit, but buses perhaps, is that in middle school, I began riding a bus.

When I was in elementary school, I walked to school.

Snow up to here with no shoes, no coat, you know the story.

But anyway, I walked to school.

But when I started middle school, I would ride a bus.

And the first year that I rode the bus, I

ended up in a little situation with the bus driver.

I believe I was running around the bus wanting a fly or a bee or something.

Anyway, he stopped the bus by the side of the road.

We were in stands, so we were within the city limits, but he pulled over, stopped the bus and ordered me out and drove off.

Can you imagine doing that today?

And I remember standing there by the side of the road with my books thinking, what?

And I was a long way really, that much longer way from my home.

And I stood there for a while and I really just didn't know what to do.

And about that time, the principal from my middle school drove by and he stopped and he said,

And I thought, what in the world?

What are you doing?

And I said, well, the bus driver threw me off the bus, put the door and he said, get in.

And he drove me home.

And I remember when I walked in the door.

Mr. Hearns, he walked me to the door and he said to mother and daddy, I brought Diana home, but she was kicked off the bus.

And mother turned to me and said, what in the world did you do?

And whatever you did, you know you shouldn't have been doing it.

That is ridiculous.

I'm not sure you would have gotten a response these days from a parent, you know.

But anyway, I was in trouble with my parents is the short end of the story.

Well, that's sure an old school story, Diana.

I mean, there'd be a team of crack attorneys on that right now if it happened today, but I'm not sure I really believe the swatting a fly story.

There were two or three of us and we were running around the bus after these, whatever they were, bugs of some sort.

And of course, I guess maybe I was the loudest or the most noticeable, but he picked me and I was the only one he kicked off.

And that kind of insulted me.

I was a little I was miffed about that.

But anyway, and I don't want to take too long here.

I really do.

I have really enjoyed my work with transit.

I always loved when I was on the school board, I would try.

I didn't always make it, but I would try every year

to ride a bus that delivered children in my district.

And I always could tell that when they picked the district that I was going to ride that, the roads that I was going to ride, they were always the bumpiest and the most narrow.

You know, they would send me on the really good routes.

But anyway, I really do think that this is a fascinating time to be in transit right now.

electric buses, who knows what's going to come with autonomous vehicles.

And the challenges, there's kind of a double edged sword because of the challenges with COVID.

But it really is a great time to be in transit.

And I look forward to helping to build up our transit system in our community.

Because certainly my residents in the county really, really need

and services, shelters and pads.

And Garland is working hard to help me try and get that done.

But anyway, it's all good.

And with that, enough about me.

And let's go on to the first agenda item, Transit Vision Plan Workshop.

And I guess

And Lucinda, do you want to introduce our visitors?

Yeah, so I'm sure you all have heard about the many studies that we're doing right now.

And this is the transit vision plan.

It's a longer term study than the Albemarle County expansion study.

And we have Tim Brule from AECOM and Scudderwag from JWA here tonight.

Welcome.

Good evening.

All right, I will share my screen.

I have a presentation that we'll want to walk through.

Let's see if I can figure this out.

There you go.

Not yet.

There you go.

Now it's popped up, or at least it's starting.

And you're in your notes presentation.

You might want to get into them.

From the beginning.

Yeah, we can still see your notes.

If you go out of that format, then

Presentation will just be larger for us to see.

There you go.

Thank you.

OK.

There you go.

OK.

So first off, thank you all for having us today.

We do want to have a robust discussion around the study, and we do have some questions for you all.

So there will be some times to sort of engage and discuss what we've been presenting.

First off, I'll kind of give a brief rundown of a general project update, kind of where we've been and what we've done and where we're going.

Then we'll talk about the key takeaways from that initial stakeholder and public outreach engagement that we've had over the past two months or so.

And then finally, we'll have a discussion about the trade offs and financial assumptions that we'll use to build our our transit vision network concepts and scenarios kind of going into entering this next phase of work.

So our study began in late 2021.

We produced some initial work products, that being the transit propensity and land use assessment technical memos.

And we've also gone through a

A pretty robust public and stakeholder engagement round here.

We produced a project website and that is currently live with a public survey that's also live.

We had a stakeholder workshop that included many of you on this call.

That was in October.

And then we had a public meeting in late November.

From here, we'll be starting our analysis on those different transit vision concepts and developing recommendations for the transit vision plan.

A second round of stakeholder and public engagement will occur during, towards the end of the next phase of work.

And then the study is anticipated to be wrapped up by the summer of 2022.

So going into the key takeaways of the public and stakeholder engagement efforts.

So like I mentioned, we did have a whole two meetings, one being the stakeholder meeting in October, and that included representatives from the RTP, this group, as well as other representatives from local surrounding jurisdictions, and also special interest advocacy groups that are interested in transit and related topics.

Both of these, this was a virtual event over a Zoom call, and we had about 30 stakeholders participating.

We also had this broadcasted live over YouTube, which we've had 30 additional views over YouTube.

And then in November, we had a public meeting

We had 20 members of the public participate in that via a go-to webinar.

We received dozens of comments and questions via the chat function, which we did address, you know, have time to address comments, the comments and questions that came up during our presentation.

And then we opened the calls up, the lines up to have open discussion among the participants and answered those questions kind of via a panel format.

So both of these events were focused on getting reactions and discussion around the various goal themes that we identified that would be included in a potential transit vision statement.

And so these goal themes include enhance, meaning provide high quality and high frequency transit options in the busiest parts of the region,

Expand, expand the region's transit service to more neighborhoods, towns, and places, and increase basic transit connectivity.

Connect, promote efficient and attractive multimodal connectivity for seamless regional travel.

Collaborate, improve internal and external communication with transit agencies, with local governments, to increase transit support of land use decisions.

Improve equity.

Improve transit access for people with low income, limited physical mobility, or lack of access to automobiles.

Grow equitably.

Create a strong linkage between transit and compact, walkable, robust transit supportive and equitable land use with safe access and egress conditions.

support enhance the region's economy and economic well-being of its residents by improving access to employment opportunities and community services and sustainability slash climate minimize the environmental impact of the region's transportation system.

So that

Some of the initial feedback that we got from our stakeholder workshop in October was that there needs to be a strong interest.

There was a strong interest in the expanded and improved service.

Also tying together land use, housing affordability, and transit.

and then also thinking about creating a different type of service for future needs, sort of post-COVID.

So, you know, what we're seeing is kind of a focus on non-peak commuting hours and exploring on-demand transit services.

So really kind of using the whole transit toolbox to think about what lies ahead.

An importance of equity in accessing high quality transit.

Importance of environmentalism and clean air.

and then exploring what it means to have a holistic transportation system.

So, you know, I take that as, as meaning, you know, incorporating, you know, we're focused on transit for this study, but you know, how are people getting to transit?

Are they, what do they have safe and accessible pathways to, to, to get on the bus?

Is there micromobility solutions that could help augment our transit services and things like that?

In the, after our stakeholder meeting, we pivoted to posting our public meeting.

And this was, it was largely a lot of the same questions that we wanted to ask the public that we talked about through the, with the stakeholders.

We did publicize the event with multiple formats.

We asked the transportation providers, Kat and John, to help pass out and promote our flyers.

for our meeting with posting flyers on buses and also posting on the screens at the downtown transit center.

We also had a press release that was picked up by a news article by CBS local news.

We had multiple social media posts, a direct mail communication to stakeholders and other jurisdictions kind of piggybacking off of existing listservs.

and also announcements at other public meetings.

I think Lucinda made the announcements at the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County Board of Supervisor meetings.

So not only was the event publicized, but also our survey, which is live on our website.

So for the public meeting,

The response to the goal themes look like the enhance what seemed to be the most important of our visioning goals, followed by connect and equity and sustainability also ranks fairly high.

But I think the broad feeling was that if we enhance public transit, that the other goals will follow.

We wanted to spotlight some comments that we received at that meeting.

The system needs to be solid before we expand it.

Needs to mention enhanced bus stops, sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks.

Improved collaboration to best use the available resources.

Priorities should be given to those who do not have a luxury of transportation.

Equity is also about less tangible things, such as seeking community feedback through decision making processes.

Transit plans should directly support comprehensive plans and should themselves encourage higher density housing.

Sustainability goals should be more about around eliminating emissions and single family vehicle use.

and climate benefits or an extension of a successful transit system.

And here we made a nice sort of word cloud bus with highlighting some of the key words that we saw during our open chat.

And so, you know,

The larger the word, the more times it was mentioned in our chat.

So you could see enhance, equity, collaborate, sustainability.

We're starting to see themes in the comments.

So this is great.

Like I mentioned, we also had a public survey, which is still live.

We're going to keep it open through January 3rd, so please disseminate that information to your constituents.

To date, we've had about 130 responses.

And so we actually have two surveys.

One is a transit vision map survey, which is you're able to kind of sort of pinpoint on a map geographically some issues or, you know, ones or desires regarding transit.

And then the survey, which is, you know, we ask questions about those themes and goals and kind of gauging people's importance.

of that.

We are using the public survey as sort of our main avenue for that public feedback right now.

So some of the key survey takeaways thus far that we've seen is that, so the first question is asking

Asking the importance of the benefits of transit service.

Overall, it looks like people view transit service as the main benefit is that it provides access to jobs and services for low income populations.

Second, reducing our reliance on auto use.

And third, environmental and air quality benefits.

Next, we asked about transit goals.

So how the regional transit vision will guide long term investments in transit?

Thinking about long term vision for transit, please rate how important each of the following potential goals would be to the region.

This question, as you can see, it looks

kind of mirrors the responses that we've got at the public meeting and also the stakeholder meeting, but enhance equity and expand seem to be the top goals.

Next, we asked if the region had additional money for transit service, please rate how important each of the following investments are to you.

Again,

Higher frequency expanding into new service areas ranked the highest.

Thank you, Tim.

Maybe we need, if you can take the presentation down, unless someone wants to see certain slides, it might be easier for you to see people if they're raising their hand for a question or a comment.

Yeah, because I see Nakaya has her hand up.

And on the slide where

You made the comment about enhancing services and that'll kind of take care of maybe some of the other things.

And in regards to equity, those enhancements have to be looked at through an equity lens in terms of expanding location, who has access and even the voices to make sure that they are, that those areas are getting the services they need.

And if you enhance without that equity lens, then it's, you may expand, but you may not serve the people

that the other category of providing service for people who may not have access to transportation in the way that we see fit.

So just making, it seems like it's there, but that comment was made.

So Tim, can you break out the responses by urban and rural responses?

So I can answer that.

We will be able to.

We don't we have not done that yet.

We but once the survey closes and finalize, we'll be able to do more of that kind of

disaggregated analysis.

With only 130 responses so far, I do know there's not a great many from outside of Charlottesville and Albemarle right now.

And also, we are asking people about their income, their race, ethnicity, whether they have cars in their household and things like that.

So we'll be able to see if there are big differences in, you know, by income and so on.

To a certain degree, if you know if there's only one or two respondents by category, it won't tell us very much.

Is there a possibility of doing some sort of campaign to maybe entice people to participate?

Yeah, I think we, for the second round of engagement, we will be sort of revisiting our

our engagement approach.

I definitely think trying to reach people where they are in my experience has been the best way, particularly if you're trying to reach existing riders, either going to the transit center or riding buses is usually the most likely way to get folks to actually respond.

So, Scudder, are you going to be giving, or Tim, are we going to be looking at trying to get more detailed as to higher frequency, what that means?

Thank you.

Well, Albemarle, I think doesn't Charlottesville have about 50 and then we have 112,000?

Yeah, well, yeah, I guess you're right.

Sorry, I said, whoops.

That's okay, that's okay.

Anyway, no problem.

So that's not, you know, the best

response, but it depends on who the 130 people were.

If they were all people who ride the bus or maybe even know someone that rides the bus or needs public transit, that would be helpful.

If they weren't, that's not gonna be real helpful.

I think on the next to the last slide, it just showed some practical

things, i.e., get buses where you can.

I mean, for ADA people, we've got jaunt.

Karen can speak to that.

But get the buses and even we're talking about microtransit, get that in areas where people might be taking the bus.

Maybe we have to go to various organizations because not everyone's going to respond.

I mean, if we send out something to everybody,

they're probably going to ignore it.

But if we go to maybe.

I know the churches where people attend in the in the area to be able to that they were they made that might be a good place to go to be able to talk to people or some of the centers.

So go to places where people are most likely that maybe to use public transit that they may be going to get this kind of information.

I don't know, in the breadth of your survey, there were a lot of kind of like, no, I won't say what ifs, but you have everything in there.

And I think it maybe it needs to be more focused and narrow because bottom line is we don't have a lot of money.

We never will have a lot of money.

So how do we get the people who need the transit?

How do we get them from point A to B?

And I would just follow up with these good comments.

Peter, do you have a way of advertising this?

You probably would at the center, wouldn't you?

Or have you been?

We do.

We circulated it via our e-newsletter.

I don't know how many people responded to that group, but I do think the and the county's points are right on.

I mean, we're thinking about

the neighborhoods of City of Promise, the Southwood community, or many other places that may not be tapped into this type of thing.

It may not be the obvious folks who do surveys.

The center can certainly host a meeting, job of senior community centers, but also get you out to Green and Savannah and Nelson.

I think that's doable.

Yeah, my concern is we're, we may be asking a lot of, and I hope nobody takes offense to this, but a bunch of, all of us are a bunch of do-gooders.

We may be asking all of us, and then we're gonna say, we want this, this, this, this, and this, and we don't even take transit.

One suggestion to him might be the local habitat has real good connections and deep roots in the Southwood community.

You have the chamber.

Excuse me, Diana, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, that's okay.

I was just going to say, one other thought I have, I'm a member of the NAACP.

Right.

We did send an email to all of our stakeholders.

There was about 160 people on that list and Habitat was one of them.

The people that you mentioned were on them and we asked the stakeholders to push the word out and ask their constituencies to take the survey and participate in the meetings.

And I believe most of them did get the word out.

No, and I know you did, but if you sent out 160 to 160 organizations and you received 130 responses,

Okay, that's not the best.

Maybe bus drivers, maybe it's a simple survey where someone on the bus can answer a couple of questions and leave it with a bus driver because once they get off that bus, chances are they're not gonna be sending it in.

They may not even have internet and they may not have mail.

I think it's important you know to also share that I don't think there's anyone on this current call that thinks that that's a sufficient response to a regional approach to get the word out and so you know to

Mr. Bruhl's point earlier that we fully intend to be relooking at the strategy and to do all of these things that you all are suggesting because this is not a regional vision if we don't get the engagement that we need in order to hear from the community.

So we respect and we actually appreciate all of this feedback that gives us other avenues that we need to continue to pursue.

And last comment, maybe structure the survey so that it's, you're not asking for the world because we know we're not gonna get everything.

Peter asked about paper surveys.

He has put something in the chat about paper surveys.

It sounds like if the bus drivers were passing them out, those would have been paper.

A flyer to go online to do it, right?

Yeah.

Paper surveys can be handed out.

People can do it at the spot.

We can hand them out at places that might be.

Yeah.

I have a question for Garland.

Garland, I think the

Isn't the Transit Center closed right now?

What's the status of the Transit Center?

It's not closed, we have modified hours.

We're only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays due to the pandemic.

What we're looking at

OK.

So really, you have limited hours.

OK. All right.

Any other comments or questions right now?

Bea, your hand is still up.

Did you have something else you wanted to say?

I think simplicity is the key.

I was just going to say, Tim, are you all ready?

Yes, we do.

I got it.

Yeah, give me the signal.

OK, so appreciate all of that feedback.

Obviously, the survey is not closed yet.

We're still gathering feedback, but from what we have heard so far, we have been talking about the challenges of some of these trade-offs where some of these goals, if we prioritize one of them and we spend more on one of them, we're doing less of the other within a fixed budget.

And so we've talked before in our stakeholder workshops, and I won't belabor the point about

this challenge of if we have different goals for different service that leads in different directions and so the example in particular in an abstract sense is if I was your transit planner which I am at least temporarily for this vision plan and this is your town and all these dots are people and jobs and all of these streets are places you can run buses and you have 18 buses and that is your budget

Then if you tell me that you want to maximize the number of jobs people can reach, you want to maximize the number of people who will find transit useful and therefore the number of people who will ride transit, then, next slide, I'm going to

tell you to design a network that looks like this and run a bus network where you've got two routes that are serving 70% of the people in jobs, and you've got nine buses on each route.

And the reason that we're putting so many buses on each route is that that means there's a bus coming very soon, every 10 minutes, probably, on these two routes.

And that means there's short waits.

It's easy to transfer between the routes because you have a really short wait when you're transferring.

And so anyone who's near those two routes, which is most of the people in this town,

are going to find transit useful.

They're much more likely to ride transit.

And that's the thing that would, on average, maximize the jobs people can reach, the opportunities people can reach by transit.

It's the thing that's going to minimize the subsidy per passenger that you're spending.

It's going to do all these other things, in particular,

The more people we get riding transit is the maximum amount of emissions and car reduction that you get per dollar spent.

The greenest transit system is the transit system where you have the most people riding per dollar spent.

But of course, this doesn't reach everyone.

And if you were the council member for the district in the southeast corner of this town, you might say, this isn't fair.

My people don't have service.

We're paying taxes, too.

And if you said, OK, we want to change our goal, we want to make sure everyone has something, then next slide, I would say.

design a network that looks more like this, where we put routes on almost every street.

But because we're spreading the service out now, we're spreading it more thinly.

And with only 18 buses, we can only have service maybe every hour, maybe every half hour if we're lucky.

And so far, fewer people find the service useful because the waits are so long, and it takes so much longer when you're transferring between routes.

But we've provided lifeline service to every place, every town, every resident.

We have provided some minimum level of transit access for as many people as possible.

And this is achieving coverage goals more than anything else.

And next slide.

The challenge that we face in any transit planning is that

Most people are asking us to do both of these things.

And we can't do them both with the same bus or the same dollar at the same time.

They lead us in opposite directions in how we spend your resources.

And so if you were asking me to do both at the same time with the same dollar, it's like you're sitting in the back of a taxi and I'm your driver and you're asking me to go left and right at the same time.

And that's just not physically possible.

So this is a geometric challenge that transit faces.

An important context about this challenge is that the range of land use and transit demand across this very large region, when you look to all of the counties across the region, Louisa and Buckingham and Green and Nelson and others,

It's useful to think about this challenge within the context of each jurisdiction or entity that's funding transit because this is really about kind of how you're splitting your funding pie.

And so currently that's all basically happening at your individual jurisdiction levels.

And so it makes sense to think about this balance at that level and within the funding of your individual jurisdictions.

If you are to think about a regional funding source and a regional fund agency, then you would start to need to think about this on a more regional scale.

And that's where we want to help you consider how you might address that conflict in a reasonable way within this regional visioning process and whether you want to start

Thank you so much.

You can't solve this geometric conflict, but we can help think about what's the right balance point or formula to manage this trade-off in your investment over time.

I encourage you to think about this as it is helpful in the next phase of our work.

The input we've received so far in the survey suggests there's a lot of interest both in expansion and in enhancing with more frequency.

And those are

Those are heading us in different directions on the ridership coverage balance here.

And so thinking about how we want to do that is an important part of the next steps of our process.

Next slide, Tim.

The next steps are we're going to develop some two scenarios of what you could do in the future with your vision for transit.

And there's basically two big picture policy questions we could explore.

in these two scenarios.

But we can really only explore one of these.

And so it's important to think about which do you want to explore and how do you want to explore it.

We can talk about funding levels.

We can explore differences in funding levels.

I'll talk a little more about that in a second.

Or we can explore the difference between emphasizing frequency and ridership or emphasizing coverage.

On the funding side, it is important to point out that right now, pre-pandemic, if we look at kind of the total operating budgets of the two main agencies in the region, Jaunt and CAT, about $8 million a year, so $16 million total between the two agencies.

Almost half of that is coming from local funding, which is what you see in a lot of communities where to run the service, most of the funding has to come from localities.

Fairs have historically provided maybe 10% or so, or up to 15% maybe at times.

federal and state funding between one and a half and $2 million or so per year in operating funding.

And I'm focusing on operating because that's what you have to spend year in and year out to keep the service running.

Obviously, that's pretty limited in terms of how much service you can actually run with that.

And in a vision of an expanded or enhanced network, which it appears people want to explore because they have strongly emphasized both enhance and expand in the feedback so far, you would need additional funding.

and you've had conversations going back as far as the mid 2000s.

There's a report from 2008 talking about possible expansions of funding.

Next slide.

And there's kind of three other regions in the state that have put forth significant regional transit funding, Northern Virginia Hampton Roads and Central Virginia Richmond region.

in order to significantly expand their transit services.

Northern Virginia is using a combination of a sales tax, a grantor's tax, and bond proceeds, but primarily the sales tax and grantor's tax as their large revenue sources to support the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority's

very large capital and operating funding.

Much of that's going to roads, about 15% to bus and 7% to other transit and 10% to bike ped improvements.

So theirs is an authority that's putting funding to a whole wide range of things.

Hampton Roads has had the HRTAC for a number of years.

That was a that is a at first has been a roads only transportation funding authority effectively.

They recently, through the legislature, passed a separate transit only fund.

that is gonna support HRT and expanding their service.

That is funded through a grantor's tax, transit occupancy tax, transit occupancy tax, excuse me, hotel tax basically, and a recordation tax.

And that portion of the fund from those particular tax sources is only going to transit and adds up to, I think, $30 million a year, I believe.

And then Central Virginia, Richmond region, also recently implemented an authority where all of the entities in the PDC's boundaries are now subject to a 0.7% sales tax and a gasoline and diesel tax of about seven and a half cents.

And in that authority, half of the funding goes back to the localities.

About 35% is gonna go to regional transit priorities that get defined through a regional process.

and then 15% is set aside directly to go to transit, specifically to GRTC for transit.

The money going back to localities can be used for any transportation item.

Most localities at this point are spending it on road projects or bike and sidewalk projects.

So those are the kind of the range of things that other regions in the state have explored.

And there's kind of a path that has been plowed here in the General Assembly of using some of these different various tax resources at a regional level to fund transportation or transit at a regional scale.

Go to the next slide.

If you were to explore that opportunity here in this region, using something like the CVTA approach of a combination of sales and gasoline diesel taxes, that would generate just under about $30 million a year based on 2020 sales tax and fuel tax numbers.

About three quarters of that would be generated just from Charlottesville and Albemarle.

So if you were thinking about maybe you only wanted to do this kind of thing just for Charlottesville and Albemarle area, you know, that's the, you know, three quarters of that number is about what you would generate from just the two jurisdictions.

But of course, this raises a question of if you want this direction in funding long term,

Do you want this to just be a transit thing?

Do you want this to be supporting a range of transportation investments, not just transit?

And then it raises questions about how you want to distribute it.

Do you want to distribute it across multiple modes and across multiple geographies, for example?

Do you want to return funding to each jurisdiction based on where the sales occurred that would benefit jurisdictions with outsized retail locations relative to others?

distributed by population.

If we're thinking about transit, distributing by population tends to spread it in a way that underfunds the denser communities where we know transit demand is always going to be higher and be more productive.

or some combination of population and jobs, which would slightly more emphasize areas with a lot of jobs, which tend to be areas with higher transit demand overall or some other combination of things.

There's a range of possibilities you could explore in that kind of formula.

But I would encourage you to consider some possibilities of if you went this route and if you wanted to explore a ridership coverage balance that you could think about at a regional scale, how much would you set towards coverage-oriented services and how much would you emphasize towards ridership-oriented services?

And you could apply that to a jurisdiction level, for example.

Next slide, Tim.

So you could set a division of budget if you had a regional authority and you were using all that funding for transit.

And you could set a regional policy of perhaps half of your resources are gonna be devoted to ridership-oriented services and half are gonna be devoted to coverage.

And you would say that that coverage portion of the pie, perhaps, would basically be distributed by population, perhaps.

And so the big question becomes, what's that balance between the two slices of the pie?

Is it 50-50, 60-40, 70-30, some other number?

Next slide.

And then you would be able to say, OK, this covered slice of the pie, we're going to put that 50% if we say it's 50-50.

And we're going to distribute that out to everyone based on population.

that will give jurisdictions more population, more funding, but it will mean everyone gets a little bit of something.

And you might set a kind of minimum floor for what could actually fund something reasonably useful in each jurisdiction.

And then the other slice of the pie, next slide, that's more ridership oriented would really emphasize putting funding towards services that you know are gonna get a whole lot of riders in the denser parts of the region.

So that's one way to think about long term, and you don't have to make any decision right now on this question, but it's a way to think about how you might, if you went this direction, set policies on how you might fund service over the long term.

Next slide, Tim.

In the context of what we're doing now, I wanted to kind of raise this as a way of thinking about things, particularly as we're about to explore concepts and get your general thoughts about ways to potentially set regional direction on this balance between ridership and coverage and on how much funding we ought to perhaps assume for these scenarios.

And of course, what we're doing is a scenarios process.

So what you, what direction you give us is for this visioning process, your policies can obviously change over time as circumstances change.

And as you decide what direction to go on.

whether or not to even have a regional authority or regional funding source.

So, you know, these decisions aren't binding, but they are helpful in helping us explore and helping you and the region explore what these transit scenarios might mean.

So to kind of put that in a little bit of a visual context, Tim, next slide.

I've talked about this ridership coverage spectrum here.

And so we have this as a policy spectrum to explore.

Next slide, Tim.

We also have this question of how much investment to assume.

Do we assume investment doesn't change?

Do we assume you might have a regional authority in the long-term that puts something like $30 million a year towards transit?

And in these scenarios, we can basically make some exploration across one direction of the spectrum.

So next slide, Tim.

If you were to tell us, okay, let's assume we're gonna have a big investment in transit long-term and let's look at scenarios of how we might invest that differently, then we can draw scenarios that show you more ridership oriented on the orange dot on the left and scenario B, the orange dot on the right, more coverage oriented

at that same level of investment, say $30 million a year, additional funding perhaps.

That's one range of possibility we can explore in helping you see what the investment could do and what it would mean to invest in different ways.

Alternatively,

Next slide, Tim.

You can say, okay, let's explore a 50-50 split in ridership versus coverage, but across different investment levels.

So at an investment level similar to today or an investment level that's only maybe 20% more than today, and then an investment level that's much, much higher.

and that's what we wanted to talk a little bit more about tonight and just kind of open discussion to get the thinking of this group about how and which of these questions we might want to explore in scenarios in the next round of technical work we do once we've received and finalized this first round of input.

And again, if you don't mind taking down your presentation, just so we can see folks and hands that might go up and questions.

Just to jump in a little bit, historically, and it was before I was on the Board of Supervisors, I think I was on the school board, but regardless, this community went to the legislature, the Charlottesville and Albemarle and

did our mother, may I, may we please, and we obtained permission to establish a transit authority.

Garland's nodding his head yes.

It fell apart and is never really formed, mainly because I've been told because of funding issues.

Now, I also think Garland, it was maybe around the time of the recession,

in the, you know, 05, 06, probably not the best time to have been talking about funding, right?

But anyway, so as a community, we have the ability from the General Assembly remains to establish a transit authority of some sort.

Just so everybody knows that.

And I'm assuming Garland that that is still good or whomever is on the

I'm still in the picture with us here, but I doubt that that expires, does it?

I don't think it expires.

The General Assembly doesn't normally set time limits on things like that.

But I would just kind of put in context, and I think Scudder, you did a wonderful job of laying out the scenarios for everybody.

For the Charlottesville region,

based on that $29 million number, that's even if it's just Charlottesville and Albemarle, that's $22 million.

That's a game changer for this region for public transportation.

So if the larger context is to do something that is regionally based, that is designed to take off to lessen the burden that continues to grow on the general funds of the city and the county,

to fund public transportation increased needs, this is an avenue we do need to explore and consider seriously to make sure that this happens eventually in the next three to five years.

And their number and just, you know, I still live in the area, so I see it in the papers, it's like $30 million for them and growing.

And that number is going to be 35 next year and $47 million in two and a half years.

The funding mechanism is there to support long-range transit efforts.

It's a way of, once again, alleviating the burden on the general funds of the jurisdictions that want transportation.

Right.

Thank you very much.

And I appreciate that.

The only other thing that I would add for everybody to think about or to remember is that when this regional transit partnership was established, ours, the intent was for it to be the first step in working towards an authority.

That's in our papers.

It's in our documents.

It's clearly stated.

So we have been working for the last few years as a partnership, but the goal eventually was to work towards an authority.

And I think, and this sounds like, because Bea caught me on my math earlier, so I don't want to do a lot of math, but Garland can correct me on this because I've been told

and I have no idea if it's correct, that when a community reaches 200,000 in population, if you don't have an authority, then you're not able to pull down federal dollars.

Is there anything in that?

No.

So is there any,

any restriction at all about population or anything.

I just wondered where that even came from.

The only threshold I'm aware of about 200,000 people is that if you are an urbanized area of more than 200,000 people and you have more than 50 transit vehicles in peak service, then you have to abide by higher standards for title six analysis purposes for, for, for your,

various things that you have to do to analyze service changes and so on.

Yeah, and I didn't know that, but I'm glad to have that question answered and clarified in my head because I had heard that numerous times.

So, but the intent of our partnership was to move towards, ultimately, an authority.

And we do have the permission now.

I found, Scudder, that presentation fascinating because that was the first time for me

that I've ever really seen dollars attached in those, you know.

So let me open it up though.

I don't want to do all the talking here.

I see Nikaya has a question.

Yes.

Good.

Just trying to get a little bit of clarification on the area that we're talking about.

So does this include UTS,

So you would have a fair amount of flexibility here in defining who is covered and who is subsumed, so to speak, into an authority.

For example, in the Richmond region, they created an authority for funding purposes, but GRTC is still the transit operator as a separate entity.

Similarly in Northern Virginia, you have Metrobus, you have Dash, you have independent operators who get some funding via the authority.

Yeah.

That's what I was trying to, that was just the big question that I had.

Did all of the entities have to come under that umbrella?

And if we talk about

and then outside of this jurisdiction with Charlottesville, Albemarle County into the surrounding counties.

I know that the work with Rideshare just made me think of that.

Does that mean that we're taking that data and information and trying to incorporate that under the umbrella?

Right, right.

And so, yeah, it's important to be clear about that.

You can try to move to a, so some authorities like the Williamsburg Area Transportation Authority did merge two agencies into one under a, you know, a certain governance structure for the purposes of running the service.

And similarly, the

The Hampton Roads Transportation District Commission is the official agency that is HRT and that was created

similarly like an authority by the estate authority.

So, you know, you can do that merger of operators in a fashion like that.

Yeah.

And I'm your official timekeeper.

So I'm keeping an eye on the time.

And we have about, you know, five or 10 minutes at the most for this discussion if we want to continue it.

But Peter, you have a question.

Yeah, thanks.

Thanks for the presentation.

My questions all the way back to the purpose of this study and the vision, which would help drive all of this to me.

You mentioned in one of your illustrations the either or about density and frequency versus lifeline and I heard you say something about

where the jobs are and my recollection of the draft vision statement speaks to solely transit for workforce riders and I asked in earlier meetings but haven't heard any real action on this is that really what we're after is solely workforce riders it seems short-sighted to me to not also make sure we're making sure people have access to grocery and pharmacies and other retail

recreation centers and YMCAs and other places that people need to go.

Maybe that's only me, but it seems like a critical component to start with about what riders we're after.

To Mayor Walker's point earlier, is it more people or more people who really rely on transit?

There's a lot of people who don't drive, they can't drive because they can't afford it or they physically or intellectually can't do it.

It seems to me we need to be not losing track of that.

So the core question is it really still going to be?

I remember that getting folks to jobs was one of our priorities, but I don't remember that that was ever the soul.

Christine, can you address that or help me with my memory here a little bit?

I actually think, Scott, you were about to respond, weren't you?

Yeah.

Well, I think, I mean, Tim or I can kind of take this on.

There was a draft vision statement for the RTP developed, Tim, was it 2018?

Yeah.

Peter, that I think you're referring to that we presented as kind of some background to the visioning part of this study.

We aren't saying that that is the vision for this study.

I think we were just trying to point to that as some visioning work that had been done in the past.

And I think based on what we have heard so far and the feedback, both from the stakeholder and public meetings and from the survey is a significant emphasis on more than just work trips and commuters.

Definitely.

And I would agree with that.

I don't think it was intended to be just for, right, Peter, but I'm glad you asked that question.

Anybody else?

Questions, comments?

I have my hand up just to mention

Two things.

One, the legislation that was enabling for the Regional Transit Authority was in about 2009, I believe.

And I think it's pretty easily found on the Virginia legislative information system.

So for Scudder and those folks, it's there.

You can find it pretty easily, number one.

And number two, I know University Transit wasn't really mentioned too much in the slides.

And our service,

is kind of broken up into about three.

You could kind of put it into three sections.

One would be straight up parking lot shuttles, you know, to intercept employees that are coming all the way to grounds.

And then last mile is provided by UTS.

So I think, I'd love to hear some feedback, but I think that that may not be like a federally funded thing to do a parking lot shuttle.

Another third of our service is moving people from on-ground locations to on-ground locations, so dorms and academic buildings and stuff.

And then about a third of our system, though, as Garland knows, is in the adjacent neighborhoods, and it seems like that would be a really good opportunity to, what did the word you used, sub-serve to the region?

to include, you know, we are funded by student bees and so there'd be a portion of that that

could potentially come to the whatever vision this beholds.

So I just wanted to provide that because UTS wasn't really mentioned too much in this presentation, but to kind of give this board a context for what can be considered in the region and what really can't.

I think those parking lot shuttles are not

eligible or whatever word you want to use.

And that's a very significant number of service hours, about a third of our service hours.

And then once you add on the other, the dorms and the on-ground locations, it's another third.

So about a third of our service is in these adjacent neighborhoods.

And know that the frequencies that we're providing is 10 to 20 minutes.

Scott, do you want to address that?

I think the thing I would just say is that, yeah, I think, you know, there is definitely an important piece of the puzzle here with how the integration of university services within a larger expanded regional network makes sense.

I think right now in the process, it's a lower altitude issue than we're dealing with at this point in the process.

But it is something to be thought more about significantly in this next phase of work.

And just a quick question.

Are there any communities or any models that have a community like ours, a university town,

Yeah, there are some other communities that do this.

Garland, were you saying something?

Well, now that's a good point.

Yeah, exactly.

So there is a way to figure this out.

I was going to mention as well, you know, an out-of-state example is a state college PA. Their transit provider also does a significant amount of kind of campus-like service for Penn State, but is a transit authority for multiple jurisdictions.

Well, you know, it's interesting because this group has talked about doing some virtual tours with other towns, cities, university areas that might be modeling something we might be able to use.

Maybe we need to look at, because we didn't even think about

That might be the place to go, a couple of those places that you mentioned, rather than, say, a Blacksburg, which is what we were looking at, or some of the others.

Do they have an authority?

They don't, do they?

No.

OK. Yeah, I was just trying to think.

OK. All right.

Yeah, we actually we thought maybe our first one would be at Blacksburg, you know, we were hoping a before the pandemic, we were talking about taking everybody down on the road trip, but

We've given up, I think, on that idea and thought maybe we could do a virtual with folks down at Blacksburg to learn some.

Well, anybody else besides me?

Do you have any questions?

Hal, do you have a question?

Well, I just want to point out, Scott, one thing is when you list your jurisdictions, you left out Flovina County, so I hope the future slides will

And second of all, as part of this, you look at the different types of alternative services that could serve rural areas that could, you know, it doesn't have to be a fixed route service, maybe some kind of a deviated fixed route or a taxi feeder service or alternatives that could

Oh, sure.

Sure.

I mean, we're more rural and small town communities.

Yeah, you as your density levels get lower and lower, you start to lean more on those tools of deviated fixed route on demand type services like microtransit or dial a ride type services, which come in a range of flavors, but are all some kind of on demand.

So, yeah, those are all possibilities that the challenge, of course, you generally face in those situations is because costs tend to relate mostly to time and wages that and it takes your distances tend to be longer when you're covering long distances between small towns or from

your small towns into Charlottesville, Albemarle area, your costs per rider tend to be a good bit higher on average, even with those kinds of services.

Now, just make a comment that Steven has put some interesting tidbits in the chat for us if you all want to take a look at it at some point.

At 2,000 people, we stopped being small, urban, and it impacts what we can use our 5307 and our 5311 funding for, and then he has some information.

So I appreciate that, Steven.

Thank you.

Well, so what do we need?

Well, I guess I would just like to get maybe a sense of the partners here at the table about, do you all want to explore a vision at a level of the $30 million a year of regional transit sort of

agency or even higher than that or something much lower?

Do you want to explore vision at a much higher investment level, assuming something like this might happen?

That's kind of a big question here.

So I was thinking more about, do we want to aim for even talking more firmly about an authority?

Yeah, the next time he's trying to pull some scenarios together, he needs a number.

So I get it.

And that makes sense.

Because unless we have a number, we can always lower it or raise it.

But we have to have a starting point somewhere, Garland, right?

Right.

So can I make a suggestion?

Nikaya, question first.

Yeah.

Well, maybe because I think this is important to take back to both the Board of Supervisors as a whole and the council.

I know we're getting some kind of update shortly or it's supposed to be scheduled and maybe this is it, but that, no?

I don't think this is it.

No, that's why I'm shaking my hand.

I don't think this is it.

Christine, is it?

But I think a presentation, well, whenever there's enough information from that, the presentation as a whole, I mean, we can sit here, Lloyd and I and say, yeah, we agree.

But we are basically saying go move on.

Honey, we're not committing to anything.

I see what you're saying.

I would support it, but I think I'm also not going to be here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I get that.

I understand what you mean.

Yes.

So part of what Scudder's requesting is a number so he can start to program and we'll have a baseline as we start to build out scenarios.

So you're going to, I assume you're going to do a static $18 million number because that's what we already have.

And that's the pot that we, the foundational pot that we already got.

And then you would look at a scenario where you would do a scenario where you would say, Hey, if you created this authority, you already have the baseline number, and then you can throw an additional 30 million or $20 million on top of it.

And this is what the new model.

That's what he's asking.

Well, that's helpful because jumping from that 18 to 30 is 29.

No, that's helpful.

So as I understand it, the pot now is 16 million and want to raise it to say 30.

So that's another 14 million.

Scott, is that what you're talking about?

So there's a range of assumptions we could make here.

We could make an assumption that you develop some kind of an authority

money starts coming into that authority and that money is additive to what you have now or it is replacing what you fund locally from general funds and then any additional is additive to your service.

So, you know, there's kind of two levels of assumptions.

There are two avenues we could go with those assumptions, two different paths we could take with those assumptions.

And, you know,

The first avenue is everything we're assuming in terms of additional funding would be completely additive.

And that of course would be a scenario with more service.

The second option is some of the money is replacing general fund dollars that you're putting in now.

Similar to what you see, I believe the CV, correct me if I'm wrong,

So yeah, the CVTA, when they set up, they only required that the jurisdiction's general fund stay at a 50% of prior levels, which meant basically automatically that new $18 million in funding per year was really only

You took six million out of that, six or seven million out of that because it was being pulled back.

Hampton Roads in their trust fund legislation required 100% maintenance of effort was what they call it.

I mean, it's pretty hard to make a commitment for our jurisdiction.

Well, I don't think we're making a commitment to spend this money at all.

This is just a, how high do you want to aim for scenario, thinking about scenarios and possibilities for the future is really what we're asking.

No, we would not.

I would never commit my, the board of supervisors to anything until we take it back to talk to them.

But I have to have the information to talk to them about and to give them what we're even

And to be honest with you, I think the gentlemen that are with us today have to have something to even, starting point to even work with to say, if you have this, you can do this.

If you have that, you can, I mean, that's my impression.

So Garland, you are one of the, do you have any thoughts about the amount?

So I would

So I'm going to defer to Christine on this one.

I believe that if we're talking about all of the jurisdictions, that is a reasonable assumption.

But if we're just talking about a scenario where we're talking about just Albemarle and Charlottesville, a $20 million or $22 million add-on

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, I certainly can attempt to jump in here, Garland.

Thank you for throwing that at me.

But, you know, again, without any of the rural jurisdictions here to speak to whether or not they also want to see this same major investment into transit.

You know, I think, again, this body as the Regional Transit Partnership needs to say, how aspirational do we need to be?

Do we want to be?

Yeah.

You know, help them all think about that through this process is we can also, you know, give everyone a sense of, you know, you're going to get X out of this, you know, your jurisdiction would get this much service and this much out of this.

So how is that being determined like to even present the information to the surrounding jurisdiction?

How are you all determining?

what to focus on.

I'm thinking right now of like the city pupil transportation versus the county pupil transportation.

That's a different conversation based on what we hear during the winter months about what the county drivers have to try to endure on the road.

So how do you talk about a merger?

So I would just say, we're not really talking about pupil.

I was just giving the example for if you're talking about expanding into surrounding jurisdictions, I know we're not talking about pupil.

I just use that.

I think if we were trying to, you know, if someone was trying to go and say, let's merge Charlottesville and Albemarle,

Let's see what that would look like.

We will need to talk to Albemarle because what we currently run here is very different than I have heard some of their needs are.

So I'm just thinking this around in counties what Green, Louisa, Fluvanna,

I know from sitting on the TJPDC meetings before that some of this is being collected with like the conversations around ride share, the needs for getting individuals who work, who live in surrounding counties into the area.

I'm just wondering what are we using to assess what we're going to do to even present or do we just think

So I think there's two things that will bring back to you all.

One is

We'll have two scenarios.

We'll have maps showing, okay, where would routes go, how frequently, all of that sort of stuff.

And then what would the outcomes of some of those things be in terms of how many more jobs could people in Greene County reach in an hour by transit or how many more people would have access to different kinds of transit services in different places

Forever?

Thanks, Diane.

Thanks, all.

Sort of a complex question to try to answer given the presentation and the matter in front of this group today.

I'm not a sitting member of the partnership.

And really just a question for the consultants, could rather than landing a, hey, it should be a $30 million bump without having the

You know, really the modeling to go with that.

Could there be some, you know, levels of service tied to dollars that this group could then react to to help better answer that question?

Yeah.

You know, we do that all the time in budget in, you know, city and at the county where we'll model different levels of investment and what that is.

I don't know if that's within the scope of the work and all that you're going to say.

Well, so part of my question was we could explore two scenarios across one axis.

And one of the axes is a little bit more investment and a lot more investment.

And we could make some assumptions.

based on y'all's direction about where we might go with that.

So if it's y'all's preference to say, let's explore 15 million and 30 million or whatever range seems like a good starting point, that's the direction we could go.

That makes sense to me, Garland.

I think it's important that we show some level of enhanced funding because it shows the possibility of what could happen.

Right.

And that is an important piece when you're talking about changing a regional model for drastic improvements.

Funding is a great equalizer.

The more money you have, the better service you can provide.

I think one of the other things that we need to think about is how to model it in a way that the rural communities can understand versus the urban communities.

I think, you know, obviously Charlottesville, urban Albemarle,

I'll be looking at fixed routes, you know, as a backbone to their model.

But in the rural areas, back to some of the early discussion, it's microtransit, it's demand response, it's commuter routes.

And I think it's so early in the discussion that there's no way to say what piece of this massive amount of money will actually trickle out to Green and Nelson and Flovina.

So I think

Scudder, does that sort of go with, that makes sense to me.

Of course, lots of Albemarle's rural.

We have 95% of our properties, our land mass is really rural.

Is it possible, Scudder, to do three and not just two?

It's not necessarily too complicated.

The more scenarios you have, yes, just the more effort it takes for everyone to try to approach the question.

And we'd also just have to talk about scope and budget of the work, the more scenarios we try to do.

That'd be the other challenge.

I think it's been a really important conversation.

I'm glad we let it go.

I think everybody would say it's okay to bypass later parts of the agenda so that we could really get into the meat of this.

I think one thing that the PDC is looking at and considering as potentially our next step is, I know in the RTP's work plan,

We talked about doing a strategic plan for the Regional Transit Partnership and then doing research and then looking at the historical documents of how the RTP was formed and for what purpose.

We're leaning towards considering doing a governance study instead and looking at the governance of the RTP, looking at the governance of the transit agencies,

and trying to determine what type of governance structure does this area need in order to be able to implement what may come out of that regional transit vision plan.

Do we need a transit authority?

Do we need to look at a transportation authority?

Does the regional transit partnership or the TJPDC in its existing form work?

And so I'm just kind of letting you guys know that we're going to begin to scope out to potentially apply for a DRPT technical assistance grant.

to do that next step so that we don't have a transit vision plan and no real structure to implement it.

And I think that's a great, sounds like, I think everybody here probably looks like to me their ears perked up.

That was interesting.

How does that work though, Scudder, with what we're talking about?

I talked with Lucinda about this a couple weeks ago as PDC staff are thinking about this and to me it makes a lot of sense.

You're developing this vision to hopefully have a vision plan by the summer and thinking the next big step is

If you do decide to go in the direction of a significant investment, then, you know, governance is a big question.

And I do strongly encourage you to think about that before you actually implement an authority and a new funding stream.

Because I think the experience that you see in Richmond and with the CVTA, there's a lot of

challenges right now with how they're going to potentially implement transit improvements because no one made decisions about governance and funding formulas before deciding on how big a pot and how to divide it.

And now there's a lot of consternation.

So it's much better to think about this ahead of that.

Well, no, it would be intended, we would be applying in the February 1 round for the funding.

And so it wouldn't be, if we were awarded, it would come around when this was completing.

So that's why we were trying to think about applying this round, although it's a very quick turnaround and getting a local match and scoping it out.

So I do,

What I'm hearing is there's very strong interest in looking at two levels of investment in scenarios.

So that gives us very good direction then on where to go in that part of the process.

So I think we've got it clearly about that.

And I think in terms of ridership coverage balance, we'll hear more from the public on that front and can work with PDC staff on thinking about

Where's the right balance point to explore in the scenarios at different investment levels, basically.

And then Christine, will you come back to us during the January meeting with more information?

on the government piece.

All right.

So that's great.

So is there anyone who has any objections or does that seem reasonable to folks?

I'm hoping to see nodding of heads.

Is that good?

All right.

I think we have a plan right for right now.

And

And my other plan is that we are running late.

It was a great discussion, and I appreciate your patience.

Our next agenda item is normally our provider update.

John has just one big piece of news.

And I think Hal, maybe you want to just introduce our new CEO.

Yeah, John, after a nationwide search that took some months, we're bringing on Ted Reich as our new CEO.

He starts on Monday.

He was formerly the General Manager of Metropolitan Tulsa Transit Authority and before that he was the General Manager in Indianapolis.

He has many years of experience and he has a good pedigree and he has, you know,

And we hope he will be able to attend our January meeting.

Okay.

Jim had to leave.

So Jim's gone.

Just quickly, of course, our driver shortage does persist significantly.

Number two, we did return to full capacity and front door loading.

So I think the other providers already do that, but I just want this group to know.

and then as the students depart, although our employee routes continue without alterations, our academic routes will be fluctuating as the academic session goes to exams and then into winter break and then to J-term.

Hot and heavy as we can.

Our numbers are improving.

We are hopefully going for the school side, bringing on four additional drivers in the next week to start the training class.

All right.

Okay, and then let me jump down to the staff updates.

I don't even see Sarah.

If you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and jump in there.

The only thing I really want to add is that we do have a new staff person that started.

So we have a new planner, Isabella O'Brien.

So she's been listening in on this call today.

So you'll see her face around a little bit.

We will be talking at the policy board meeting a little bit next week.

So that for those of you that don't know we're meeting on the seventh next week to also accommodate the holiday schedule.

We'll be talking a little bit about the MPO budget because we are understaffed right now we're a little bit behind on being able to get through some of the projects on our work plan so we'll be so we'll be discussing what our strategy is for managing the current work plan and

What we're doing moving forward, you know, and at the same time we're also still looking for an experienced transportation planner.

So the Albemarle County Transit Expansion Plan is wrapping up their public outreach.

They found that most of the services that people selected in that public outreach was

Scenarios 2 for all three of the areas, which was a lot of micro transit connecting with some fixed routes.

Okay, great.

No changes at this point in time.

Okay.

Peter, does that help?

I've lost you.

You moved on the screen again.

There you are.

Okay.

He says thumbs up.

I really, and let's see from Sandy, we have Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Rivanna River Bike Pin Crossing.

I lost it.

Oh, you're talking about for the first time, met for the first time on November 30th.

Okay.

And you guys can take a look at what's in the chat.

There is some interesting information in the chat if you have time.

And it is 554.

This is Neil, and I just want to give a comment that our application period opened up yesterday, December 1st, but our website and application site has still been compromised.

So we'll send out word when hopefully people can get back in and start working on their applications.

We're not really sure what

So we apologize for that, but I'm not in the IT world to know what could be causing that.

So just one other little information for people in Charlottesville that I just got word that notice that the UVA football coach just resigned.

And now you're going to send us off and everybody's going to be good.

Any other comments or questions?

Because I know that this group is always happy to get out a little early or a few minutes early.

I really appreciate the good, good discussion we had today.

It was really wonderful.

An exciting discussion and I appreciate your patience with me.

I think everybody may hope is that comfortable with where we are right now.

We will, our next meeting is January the 27th.

So hearing no objections, I'm going to adjourn us to January the 27th.

And I hope everybody has a wonderful, safe and fun holiday season.