Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   1/27/2022

Good afternoon and welcome to the Thursday, January 27 Regional Transit Partnership meeting.

We're glad to see everyone.

Our first order of business is I'm going to read the official declaration.

This meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia 22.2-3708.2, 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.

are 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.

There will be an opportunity for public comment during that portion of the agenda.

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

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

The meeting was held by electronic communications, the type of electronic communications means by which the meeting was held.

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

And I'm going to ask at this time, Lucinda, call the roll.

And if you'll just affirm that you're present or make sure she can see your wave somehow or another, that would be lovely.

Thank you.

Supervisor McHale for Albemarle County.

Present.

Supervisor Lupisto-Kurtley from Albemarle County.

So she will be there.

I talked to me today.

Yeah, she's here.

Um, Director Morgan from John Rural.

Councillor Pinkston from the City of Charlottesville.

Ms. White from UVA Parking and Transportation.

Hi, I'm here.

Ms. White from Albemarle School System.

Present.

Ms. Pennington from Rideshare.

Present.

Okay, you have everybody.

Lucinda.

And I just want to take just a couple of minutes to recognize that we do have a couple of new members that have joined us today.

So Ted Reek is here.

And Ted, and I'm looking for your picture, Ted.

Wait for me.

There you are.

Ted is the new director.

Ted is the new director at John, and Ted is gonna have a few minutes on the agenda, yes, sometime on the agenda, to introduce himself.

Are you, where are you?

Great, so at least we know who Drummer 66 is, who that is.

So hopefully you'll get on.

I don't know if there's anything Lucinda can do to help you, but let us know if we can.

Lucinda can help perhaps.

And then we also have Brian Pinkston is the new city.

There's Brian.

I see him now.

He just popped up.

Welcome, Brian.

I'm doing good.

Lean closer.

That's great.

Thank you and welcome aboard.

Thank you.

It's good to be here.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think, Lucinda, we have a new staff person that's here, Ryan Nichols.

Would you like to see him again?

There's Ryan, you moved.

You're up in the corner.

Okay.

Yes, I'm Ryan Mickels.

That's great.

All right.

I think we introduced Isabella O'Brien in the last meeting.

We did, but Isabella, maybe just to, where are you, Isabella?

Let me start my video.

My room was a little dark, so I didn't want to be off.

Environmental and transportation.

That's great.

We love the connection.

All right.

With that, Lucinda, are there any matters from the public?

Any speakers?

Give you a couple of minutes.

If we don't see anybody, then we'll move on to approval of the meeting minutes from December 2nd, 2021, which were in your packet.

Does anybody have any

Edits, I know most of the time if we have edits, we call Lucinda and let her know, but did anybody catch anything?

Okay, that's great.

All right.

Thank you, Becca.

So with that, I'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes.

I'm sorry.

So and then I need a second.

And who made the second?

Mr. Sherman, great.

It was Neil.

All right, there we go.

So all those in favor, please respond or wave aye.

Aye.

Any noes and any abstentions.

So Brian Pinkston is abstaining.

Right, as is Ted.

Okay.

All right.

Neil, you're abstaining as well.

Hi.

Okay, sounds good.

So we have three extensions, Lucinda.

All right, so the minutes have passed.

We have at this point, a member spotlight.

And we've asked

Ted and Peter Thompson to do the spotlight this particular month.

And Brian, you're going to get your chance in Charmaine later, another month.

So who wants to start?

Okay.

Ted, go right ahead.

I don't want to take too much time.

I'll just kind of give a little bit of a biographical background in terms of my transit experience.

And the story I'm about to tell you is familiar because I've heard it by other people as well.

I kind of just fell into transit.

I wasn't a lifelong ambition or anything.

I was doing graduate work at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio.

saw an internship at the local transit authority and thought it would be a good job.

So I took it and never left transit since then.

And that's how most people seem to get into this, they just fall into it.

But over the years, I've worked in Detroit and Kansas city in various planning positions.

I went to Indianapolis to be general manager there.

that I went back to Kansas City to do consulting work.

In consulting, I was there for about 20 years.

I went a little bit of the country doing various transit plans, capital projects, pretty much did the wide range of things in consulting.

Then I went to Tulsa to be the general manager where I was just recently.

And now I'm here.

And my main interest in transit is to

improve the impact of transit services and the efficiency of how services and organizations deliver those benefits.

I'm enjoying my time so far at John.

The staff has been very welcoming.

The community has been very welcoming as I've gone out to meet everybody.

And I do see some really great opportunities to improve

Our situation here and a lot of people want to innovate and that's kind of what I like to do is innovate, find new ways of doing things.

So I'm hopeful that my background and what we're trying to do here at John can be beneficial to the community as a whole.

Great, thank you.

Ted and I had a great time.

I don't know, Ted, a few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to talk transit and affordable housing with Keith Smith on his radio, on his show.

And that was kind of fun.

We had a good time kicking it around.

It was good.

And I guess the podcast is up there somewhere.

Anyway, Peter, it's your turn.

Ted, welcome to Albemarle Charlottesville.

I look forward to getting to know you better and working with you when you get settled in a little bit better.

My day job is Executive Director of the Center, also known as the Center of Bellevue.

I've been there 22 years, and I represent the Charlottesville Area Alliance Transportation Work Group here at the Regional Transit Partnership of our great community.

You know, listening to people's stories over the last several months, including Ted starting at a fairly young age, at least college age,

Yeah, I grew up in very dense, walkable, bikable suburbs of Manhattan Beach, California, and Arlington, Arizona, Virginia.

And so I walked and biked everywhere from K through 12.

I never used a school bus, even in the 60s and 70s, when that was due rigor for most people.

I probably didn't even hardly know buses existed.

I lived in a very walking, biking,

world.

And when I came to UVA, back in the late 70s, you could actually find affordable housing within walking distance of UVA and work at the Virginian restaurant as a cook and pay your way through college.

And so my early years in Charlottesville, Albemarle was also I walked and biked everywhere.

I didn't own a car.

I didn't use public transit.

And I was thinking for reasons that are pertinent, but I remember in the late 80s, I was asked to

take a job as the general manager at Rococo's Restaurant, which was on Commonwealth and hydraulic right behind Stonefield.

And I remember the biggest negative, I was living down near the university still, the biggest negative of it was I didn't want to drive all the way out to Hydraulic Road, way out on the north edge of Charlottesville, Albemarle in 1986, I think.

But long story short, I really got my interest in transit when I started working with nonprofits in the community, food banks, I did a lot of volunteer work with the food banks, Habitat for Humanity, International Rescue Committee when they first moved to town, Madison House, and learn more about the breadth of the needs in our community and how important transit and affordable housing and planning all

needed to sync together for people who were less fortunate and couldn't drive either because they couldn't afford it or didn't have the physical or intellectual ability or were choosing to not do it for environmental reasons.

And working at the center, it's become a very big focus in my years.

particularly in most recent years as we looked at building a new center and how we tried to make sure it be accessible to transit.

And that's where my attention to transit really ramped up over the last 10, 20 years and particularly the last several years.

A lot of older adults can't drive for a wide variety of reasons.

They can't afford it, can't do it physically, can't do it intellectually, or again are making a decision that for environmental reasons they don't want to drive.

They want to help our community from a climate standpoint and they want to be able to use public transit.

So that's where my interest comes from.

The center

So the CAA, there are eight dimensions of an age-friendly community, our local community after doing research, selected housing, transit, and social engagement as our three focus areas.

And I've been involved in the transit area, particularly in this past year.

So I'm very excited about CAA's role in transit.

I'm very excited about the center has recently approved both a racial equity and a strategic plan.

And both of them include transit as important components of trying to do that work.

The strategic plan, one of the most specific items in it, you know, a lot of strategic plans are kind of there at a very high level.

But transit is one of our key areas.

So that's based on talking to a lot of community leaders,

to do that strategic plan.

There's any strategic planning done, a lot of stakeholders had input.

And I'm certainly very excited about the possibility of some of the pilot programs that Albemarle County tentatively approved if we can get the matching funds for on demand.

That is very exciting to me.

I'm looking forward to working with Ted and John's leadership to see how much more we can do there and continue to work with Mr. Williams and his CAT crew about how we can get the CAT public bus right to our front line, front door along with

Other route transit changes.

So a lot of good stuff going on.

A lot of good players.

I'm thrilled at how many different people are looking at transit and really not just talking about it, but really trying to find solutions that are doable in our community.

Thank you, Peter.

And as we all know, what's good for those of us that are older is also good for those that are younger and everybody in between.

So with that, unless there are questions for Ted or Peter, and I know sometimes this group has had questions, but no questions for them.

Then Lucinda, are you introducing our speaker?

I see that Eric has popped up.

Yeah, so as part of our Pure City initiative, this is our first speaker.

Great.

I know for a lot of us, at least, well, I should speak for myself.

I used to spend a lot of time in Blacksburg because I had a daughter that was in Blacksburg school.

So I am at least familiar with your bus system from the past.

And can everybody hear, Eric?

I think you sound a little bit faint to me, Eric.

Testing one, two, three.

That's better.

Thank you.

All right.

All right, great.

And thanks.

I see a couple of familiar faces and probably some of you know Blackbird Transit better than I do.

But can you all see my PowerPoints?

No, not yet.

No.

Okay.

Try that again.

Yeah.

It does have it.

So let me try one more time.

I just started it as we practiced this once before, sort of.

Sometimes you have to give the speakers permission.

What do you see now?

No.

Yeah, why don't you go ahead, let's not mess around.

You have the PowerPoint, right?

Yeah.

All right, so... All right, now we're getting it.

Hold on one minute, it's pulling up.

There we go.

All right, and Peter will appreciate this.

Peter, I did not take the bus my entire life except a school bus until my first day at Blackbird Transit.

And that was in 2008.

I grew up like you.

I was in San Jose area in California and I pretty much rode my bike everywhere for various reasons.

And then when I got to Blacksburg, I lived a mile from campus.

So I rode my bike almost every day to work, no matter what the weather was.

And I never really needed it.

Never even thought about the bus much and kind of fell into it like you.

I did transportation research on the smart road, which is a test track here.

for about 10 years on and off as a student and then as a grad student and then as a postdoc.

And then when the economy fell apart in 2007, 2008, my funding dried up and my wife actually found the listing for a transit planner on the town's website.

And that's sort of the story of it.

I got lucky that way.

So here we are, me standing in front of a bus, which I've never driven, but I made it look like I did that day.

and so I just want to give you guys about 15 minutes maybe of some examples of collaboration in my region and of course some of it has expanded beyond the New River Valley which is where Montgomery County is.

So thanks again to Lucinda and the whole partnership for having me today.

So as a bit of background, Blackford Transit is a department of the town of Blacksburg

We're really separately branded and we have a separate fund, an enterprise fund, and separate buildings.

So we are really treated as a separate entity and we're branded that way, but we are just another department, kind of like a big police department is.

So we're one of the biggest ones in the town, but we are separately branded and funded.

You can go to the next slide.

I just didn't want to assume anything, but we're about

About two and a half hours from you, straight down 81.

Neil Sherman's been here many times.

He knows the road.

He knows the drive.

We have a lot of similarities to you.

You can go to the next slide.

In that, you know, our county, Montgomery County, is about the same size as Albemarle County.

You can go to the next slide.

And of course, we are peers in that we share a lot of things.

We're both about 100,000 in population.

You can go to the next slide.

Blacksburg and Christianburg are the two towns in our region with about 44 and 22,000 population each.

And then, of course, in your area, there's lots of areas, but Charlottesville is the single largest city.

And then other areas have pockets of populations all around.

So I think it's a good comparison in a lot of ways.

And you can go to the next slide.

And of course, with transit, we're, again, very similar.

Part of the main difference is that we mainly have one big system, which is Blackbird Transit, which for years was the only system.

But now that has been expanded to include 50 other vehicles from various systems in your area.

Of course, there's Jaunt and then UTS and CAT.

and several others, I'm sure.

But sort of those are three big ones that I am familiar with.

And so, again, it's about the same number of vehicles, about the same number of trips, you know, around five hundred or five million trips, roughly in each of our areas annually.

And of course, it's gone down a little bit last two years, but that's still the general numbers that we have.

So I think it's a great peer comparison.

You can go to the next slide.

You know, we also have the challenge and I'll talk about this slide in a second.

But the challenge in our area, of course, is serving our university communities and the local communities and all the areas in between them.

So I put this picture of my clock here just to kind of remind each other.

It takes a lot of time for planning, and I have bus stop improvements and routes in mind that I've been thinking about for 14 years, which still have not happened.

So it's just something to remember and to remind all of us in the Zoom that

You know, especially when you're trying to improve and increase communication and collaboration, it may take a lot of time and take longer than you want, but it's always good to keep keep that in mind that that's what we do as planners as we think ahead.

And I also wanted to kind of remind you if you guys want to stop and ask me questions anytime just just do that you can do in the chat or even better just take your mic off and start talking and ask me a question that's fine.

I'll basically frame the rest of my presentation in three general areas.

You can go ahead and talk about Blackford Transit service a little more specifically, and then talk about the MPO, the Metropolitan Planning Organization here, and then talk about other systems.

So that's sort of my three kind of main areas.

So we'll jump right into Blackford Transit with the next slide.

Blackford Transit, of course, is the main or was the main and only transit

in the area for a long time.

A little bit of background was that next slide.

You can click the next slide.

Like I said, planning takes a long time.

And this is Bob.

Bob in the 70s was hired by Virginia Tech to look at how to get transit in the area.

And if you look closely at that old newspaper there, it says 1974.

and it took about 10 years for planning to complete before transit really started.

So again, he was planning this for a long time before it started.

And of course, central to that was communication with Virginia Tech.

Next slide.

So Bob, like I said, he was a professor at Virginia Tech as a planner.

And so of course, he worked to bring transit.

He also worked with the region and other councils.

and looked at things like economic development and new things coming like the mall, which in the 70s was a big concept to come soon.

And how to get people like students to and from the two towns to get to the mall and Walmart and to do shopping, etc.

Next slide.

and Bob Stewart was also really involved with council behind the scenes, not just in doing the transportation planning studies, but in going to council meetings and in convincing the council that this was needed.

Again, it could be a really long story, but I'll make it short.

Council had to vote twice to pass transit, to pass the okay to get funding for transit.

And the first time it was a no, and I think, again, I was not there, but the short version is, you know,

We are not sure if this will work in this area.

So they did a study, another survey of students on campus, and they found 80% of students supported the idea of transit and actually were able and willing to put in a transportation fee to help pay for it.

And so that fee has been in place ever since.

And that's when they went back to council with this information and this willingness, that's when the council passed it.

So again, I was not there, but Bob Stewart was one of the people who helped get transit started back in the eighties.

Next slide.

So like I said, it took almost 10 years for the transit to start, but then in 1983 three bus routes that had been originally been proposed were started.

And like I said, that took a while to do, but you know, next slide.

It's so simple to look at it back in those days, right?

This is how it was, a nice little simple plan.

You have a little simple black on pink route and you just put it out there and go.

And that's not exactly how it was, but sure it looks simple when you look back at it.

Like I said, when the mall came on board in the 80s, and then we started in 1983,

The big discussion was, how do we get the two towns connected?

So that's when in 1990, after several years of planning, the two-town trolley was introduced, and that was to get Blacksburg and Christianburg connected.

They're about six miles apart.

Again, it looks real simple on this map, but it took a lot of collaboration to get that going so that students and others could get between the two towns and do shopping and go to the mall.

So of course, there's a lot to this, but

The collaboration that would be needed to make this happen is pretty intense.

Jumping ahead to when I started, I started in 2008.

Neil Sherman may remember the day when Becky Martin and others interviewed me and got me on board.

One of the reasons I got the job was because, like I said, I was from a background of transportation research and they wanted to do a big survey of Christianburg, the nearby town, to look at

More than just a connection between the two towns, what can we do within the town?

So we spent about 10 months surveying and reaching out to the community.

We sent out 20,000 in the mail paper ballots.

It was a six-page survey.

You can imagine getting people to fill out a six-page survey.

We actually had a 37% response rate, which is huge for any survey.

If you get 10%, you're happy.

So long story short, we got

a lot of community involvement.

And actually, frankly, it was a marketing effort from the beginning.

So we were getting people to know that transit was coming by the survey.

And after like I said, after a while, we were able to get the transit route started and expanded within the town.

So that was a really fun and exciting period.

You go to the next slide.

It culminated in a this is a great picture of a lot of mucky mucks in the room here.

We have people from Virginia Tech,

and we have decision makers from the towns of Christianburg and Blacksburg, including both mayors and the town managers.

And most of the council from both councils are in this picture as well.

And this was a big day.

It actually didn't rain too much, but this is in November 2009, 2010.

We kicked off the new routes in Christianburg with the Blacksburg transit logo there.

So it's kind of a first step in expansion in our area for a long time.

And the big deal, of course, was the MPO was behind the scenes.

Literally, there's Dan Brew in the background.

And he was the one who helps facilitate a lot of discussions and the funding, which is a big deal for Christianburg Town Council to step up and put aside operations and capital money every year.

You can go to the next slide.

So, Christianburg, like Virginia Tech, both have a contract with the town of Blacksburg, with Blacksburg Transit, to provide transit service

And this is a really messy map, but it kind of shows you now, instead of three routes in 1983, and this is the 2019 map, it shows we have 15 routes now, including paratransit throughout Blacksburg, and then a go anywhere service, which is a demand response service within the town of Christianburg.

And then of course, we have, like I said, the two town trolley that connects the two towns.

So it's really grown a lot.

And of course, it's taken a lot of collaboration to make that happen.

You can go to the next slide.

And I know I'm going quickly.

I'm trying to slow my speech down so you can understand me.

There's three sort of big takeaways that have kind of implied this whole time, and I'll dig into these a little more here.

One is that Blacksburg and Virginia Tech have had a win-win from the very beginning, from just a financial point of view,

Blacksburg was able to to capitalize on literally capitalize on Virginia Tech's transportation fees from the students.

And that has been the large share of the local match.

The local match is very significant.

Michael just asked me about the transportation fee that Virginia Tech students pay.

I'd have to look it up.

I think it's on the order of eighty dollars a semester.

It used to be $6 in 1983, so I think it's just keeping up with inflation and expansion.

But it does cover the large majority of our local match for all of our grant funds and for our service.

The other thing, of course, is the Blacksburg Transit specifically and Virginia Tech communication has been vital for all this to happen.

In fact, we have a monthly meeting with Blacksburg Transit and Virginia Tech

to talk about everything from bus stops to lighting to new routes to detours to football games to everything else like that.

So it's been something we've always had to do.

We have an annual contract with Virginia Tech.

So of course, that is a heavy discussion every year as well.

And we have to make sure we always make that happen plenty of time so they have time for their budget folks and our budget folks to get everything lined up.

And then more broadly is town gown.

I know this is sort of a touchy subject for every university, town or city, but we've had a strong ongoing town gown relationship.

They have three semesterly meetings with students, faculty, staff and citizens on campus.

And they talk about various topics everywhere from, you know, affordable housing to outside activities.

And of course, now transit is a huge topic with

being fare-free, and of course, masks are still required on transit and all that kind of thing.

But that's been really important to continue on.

And then every year we have surveys of students and other riders to find out what they want to improve as far as service and expansion.

So that's something we continue and do through the town gown committee.

You can go to the next slide.

So, of course, I focused a lot on Blacksburg Transit.

I'm gonna talk a little more broadly about the Metropolitan Planning Organization.

In our case, it's the New River Valley, which is including Montgomery County and other areas.

You can go to the next slide.

Our MPO is pretty broad, includes the town of Blacksburg and the town of Christianburg as the main two towns, but we also service the city of Radford, which is where Radford University is, with about 10,000 students.

and then Pulaski County, a part of it.

There's a typo on there.

Look at that, Pulaski.

Pulaski County, we serve as part of that now, and we have a lot of coordination with those areas.

You can go to the next slide.

The MPO also coordinates, like I said, a lot of other groups.

One is Valley Metro in Roanoke,

provides the SmartWay service.

The SmartWay commuter bus connects Roanoke, which is where the airport is, to Blacksburg and Christianburg.

It started, I think, in 2004.

So it's got almost 20 years going on now.

And every hour and a half or so, it's a commuter bus for $4 between the two areas.

Someone just told me that the Virginia Tech fee is $97 a semester.

OK, thank you.

The SmartWay bus is $4 like I said and of course it's a regional collaboration between the city of Roanoke and the MPO region so it's kind of a bigger broader area than just the MPO here but it's a great example of how we have to coordinate with them because they literally share bus stops with us and go on to Virginia Tech campus and a big bus like that especially you have to be very careful and very very specific as to where you are able to let it go and make sure you can share bus stops with our big buses too.

Next slide.

The MPO does have representatives from various places.

You can go to the next slide, please.

Oops, that's two slides, I think.

There we go.

Actually, listen, if you can go back, that'd be great.

I just let the cat out of the bag.

I wanted to talk briefly, you know,

The smart way is a good example of collaboration between two different valleys.

But of course, we also a lot of my job more and more is coordinating with Blackford Transit and Pulaski Area Transit and Radford Transit.

So that's a big part of what I do now is collaborating on these four different transit groups because we're sharing stops and sharing roads and sharing now literally sharing signs to just to get enough sign space and some of our signs.

So it's something I continue to do more and more.

Whereas when I first started in 2008, Blackbird Transit was the only game in town, and so my job was really just Blackbird Transit.

Now it's really gotten more regional that way.

You can go to the next slide now.

Another example, and it's kind of a small one, but it's an important one, and it's a great one for collaboration, is the bike share that we launched in 2018.

You might kind of wonder why transit has anything to do with bike share, but a lot of us call it mini transit.

And this has,

14 people on the committee.

It's a huge committee, four people that vote, including two towns, the university, and of course the county.

So we've collaborated together for four years now on this system.

And the bikes now are teal instead of orange, but these are the original bikes that were launched in 2018.

Now we have electric bikes.

And so there's a whole another set of issues, but those are in place now.

And of course, the planning for bike share, it literally took 15 years before we had a bike on the ground.

So again, that's what my next slide is all about, is reminding us that it takes time to do these things.

You can go to the next slide, Lucinda.

I'll take a quick break here.

Is there any quick questions so far?

I have about eight more slides.

I imagine there are some questions.

Okay, great.

I'm looking at the chat here.

It looks like Virginia Tech is slightly behind UVA as far as the transportation fee goes.

No, actually, we're 50 cents ahead.

Thank you, Becca.

I've got a question for Eric.

Sure.

Talking about funding, what other sources of funding besides the, you are the recipient of federal funds and state funds for transit, I believe, and then you've got this student fee that gets, you know, pays the local share.

Well, it's not, and I'm not the finance guy, but we do about $100,000 of advertising as well on the buses.

So that's significant.

Of course, it's probably changed the last couple of years because of COVID, but that's grown the last 15 years from $8,000 to $100,000 for bus wraps and advertising on and in the buses.

That's a big thing.

And of course we have a contract with the town of Christianburg.

That's probably the other single largest source besides Virginia Tech.

Operating, I should look, I should know this.

It's in that range.

Neil Sherman might jump in, he probably knows a little bit to be dangerous.

Of course, when we order buses, it's a whole other deal.

If we order 20 buses one year, it's like our capital budget is through the roof compared to what it was when we ordered two buses.

But of course, operating is pretty consistent.

Even with COVID and some of the cuts we've had to make, the operating has been pretty consistent.

I can get you that detail later.

All right, let's continue on.

Like I said, bike share has been a very exciting thing and it's near and dear to my heart.

Again, I do bike to work a lot and I still enjoy that.

Next slide, we can go is about the other systems.

And I've kind of hinted at this already.

I'll end with some examples from regional collaboration with other systems over the last 20 years, mostly involving transit.

You can go ahead.

Next slide.

Like I already talked about, the SmartWay Commuter Bus started in 2004.

That's a big deal because it's literally coming right down Main Street and onto campus.

And that's been going on for a long time.

Radford Transit started in 2011 so it's about just over 10 years and they didn't start going to Blackford right away but they do now go to Blacksburg pretty much every day starting I think at 3 p.m.

I think that might have been changed a little bit because of the COVID but pre-COVID it was going here five days a week basically Thursday through Sunday from 3 p.m. till 1 a.m. in the morning so it was a great way to get between the two campuses if you wanted to

And then in 2005, Pulaski Area Transit started.

And then 10 years later, they started a new route to Christianburg, which is where that mall is and where a satellite campus of their community college is from Dublin.

So that's a great way for Pulaski and Christianburg to be connected.

And of course, we, Blackford Transit, go to that same stop and share a stop with them so people can actually transfer and get to Blacksburg if they need to.

And then big things happening the last five years with Amtrak.

And of course, DRPD has been hot and heavy with the Virginia Breeze and other ways to get around to D.C. Amtrak started their Roanoke Station in 2017.

And as you all know better than me, that takes a long time to get a Roanoke, you know, a train station is a much harder thing to build than a bus station.

And then the Virginia Breeze started in 2017 as well.

So we're really excited because we have a bus that goes straight from

Campus to the Roanoke Station and you can get on that and you do that through a single ticket actually through Amtrak.

And then soon, sometime soon, we'll say within 10 years, a transit station is coming into our New River Valley as well.

I mean, I'm in Amtrak station, sorry.

So Amtrak will be in our area with new transit connections and trail connections to that soon.

So that's something we're talking about all the time.

And as it gets closer and closer, it's something we'll make happen here soon.

And then these are all in our region.

So we're really always working on expanding our regional role here, my regional role as planner.

You can go to the next slide.

This is just another way to see what I just said or say what I just said.

The logos just kind of speak the language there of those five different systems and five different efforts.

And you can go to the next system.

Next slide, I mean I'm going to skip that chat for a second.

So just, I'm going to breeze through these quickly, but these are some regional projects that might kind of throw some ideas your way.

I know part of the reason that you're talking to peers is to maybe get some lessons learned from us and maybe this will give you some ideas of some things we've done that might work for you guys.

You can go to the next slide.

I have a slide for each one of these actually.

So first one is in 2009.

It's really a theoretical exercise, but

was one of my first big projects that I did as a planner.

And as a new planner, I was really excited because I got to work with four counties and look at employment routes and what we could do in theory, at least to connect some of these areas like Floyd, which is a very small area to Blacksburg and beyond.

And we came up with seven concepts and it was just a really fun exercise to go through and look at what could we possibly do in the future.

Those are the first collaboration I was involved with.

You can go to the next slide.

And then what used to be called the bicycle pedestrian plan in 2014 later became the multimodal plan.

This is something that the Newver Regional Commission did for us.

And I say us, I mean the MPO.

So it was updated in 2021.

It was really a way to look at corridors of the area and looking at all the way down to bicycles and sidewalks and eventually to trains.

But kind of looking at from a regional perspective, how would you want to connect these and where would you want to improve things if you could?

So that was something that was done and updated in 2021.

And the original plan didn't include transit, that was included in 2015 and 2021, sorry.

Next slide.

I did an exercise with a paid intern, my only one time I had a paid intern for GIS,

and he helped me look at, and this is before DRPT was really doing this, look at getting transit data, electronic transit data from other systems and getting them in a single place.

So we spent a good four months, a semester for him, looking at transit data we already had in Blacksburg, but connecting it with Radford and Pulaski area transit and even Valley Metro, which was in Roanoke with a smartway bus, some of which we had to do by hand.

But it was the first stab at kind of getting data from different areas and getting it all together in these multiple counties.

So that was a kind of a fun exercise, too.

But it kind of gave me an excuse in my in my my intern and excuse to talk to some of these folks afresh about what data they have and what what ideas they have for new routes.

Next slide.

And then the regional commission, as I mentioned before, has been very

involved with the MPO.

They collaborate a lot.

They're actually two separate organizations, which is not common in Virginia, but in this case they are separate.

So the Regional Commission was doing a study for the region and looking at how to collaborate between the systems better as far as shared stops.

Overlapping stops was a big theme, and we had a lot of them, but the issue is how can you improve them physically

and with lighting and better ramps and better access and even trash cans and bike racks, what are some of the areas we can improve and collaborate on to get those things going?

Next slide.

And then related to that in a way is three separate studies that were done by the same consultant looking at, but actually that's not quite true.

The consultant did one for us.

I think it was Kimley-Horn for Blackford Transit first in 2015 for looking at bus stops before and afters and how to make them better.

And then the Regional Commission modeled that study for Pulaski Area Transit and Radford Transit and did it themselves.

to look at how to improve their bus stops.

So it was a really good effort.

In fact, I still use the Blacksburg Transit Study.

Seven years later, I still have a list of stops I'm looking at to try to get improvements done.

It does take a long time sometimes when you have a significant $20,000 or $30,000 improvement you want to put in, but I keep picking away at it.

Next slide.

I think this is the last one and probably maybe

From Lucinda and I's conversation, this might be one that's very interesting to you guys.

We, as you all know, are required to do transit development plans.

And so I had an aha moment in about 2015, I think it was, I said to Dan Brew, our director, why don't we get all the plans to go at the same time?

Why not collaborate them in a single plan?

Ideally, that was our first thought.

And then DRPT said, no, we can't do a single plan.

But

We can do something close, which is we'll have the same consultant do all three plans simultaneously.

That's exactly what we did.

And I was able to go to meetings at all three areas.

Of course, Blackbird Transit is the easiest because it's where I live, but I also made several trips to Radford and several trips to Pulaski with some students in tow.

And we have all of them were finished in 2018 and they're all separate documents.

They're separate deliverables.

They all had to be signed off separately by each council, et cetera, and their MPOs and all that.

But the neat thing is that now they're all lined up in the timeline.

They'll all be renewed the same time.

They're updated each year, of course, in the same way as required.

and we have kind of set the tone for the next five years, which I think is in 2023 or 24, we'll have to do them again.

So when that happens, they'll all be lined up again to happen at the same time.

I know in your region, this may not be quite possible yet, but it is something to talk about amongst yourselves, of course, because if you can get DRBT on board with this, I think it's a great way to kind of get things lined up and synced up so that

Your planning could be a little more comprehensive and more collaborative that way.

So I think that's the last one I have.

You can go to the next slide.

Reviewing what I talked about, I talked about Blackford Transit and Virginia Tech to start out with.

And, you know, in 1983 is when we started.

And then I kind of expanded to some of these MPO projects and ended it with the three other examples or several examples of the three systems.

Working with Radford Transit and Pulaski Area Transit with Blackboard Transit has been a big challenge, but it's been something I've been slowly kind of working on ever since I started here in 2008.

Next slide.

Last slide.

There's me again.

This was a actually, this is a day when we had our Citizens Academy where we have people go through all the different departments in the town and learn about each department in the town.

So I think my second year at transit, I did it on my own.

to learn about all the different, you know, police department and public works and all that.

And we had a day at transit too.

So I got my picture in front of the bus.

Yeah, I did an image credits one, but that's it.

Okay, then Lucinda, can you bring us back to the big picture?

And we can always go back to a slide if anybody wants it.

That was really wonderful.

I am so impressed with how you all have coordinated and what you're doing in that area.

I will say that you're making me feel better because our regional transit partnership is five years old.

And sometimes we feel like we're moving very slowly.

But you you make us

To continue to show that the clock is a really good idea.

So I want to open this up for questions because I'm sure people have lots of questions.

Who wants to start?

This is Rebecca.

Sure.

Eric, thank you so much for that presentation and really appreciate it.

When you talk about the shared bus stop signs, may I email you separate from here to

Yeah, sure.

And those three studies I mentioned with the bus stop improvement studies, those are all available.

I can make those links available more easily.

That'd be great.

Thank you.

Yeah, we have about, I don't know, Garland,

Ted, we probably have at least four that are shared with Kat, John, and UTS, and then probably at least 20, I think, with Kat that are shared.

Other questions?

Yeah.

I got another question.

Hey, Eric, can you speak at all on Virginia Tech's e-scooter research program?

Virginia Tech was one of the only properties really that launched e-scooter as a research project.

And they were really going to do some academic, educational, fully

vetted data on e-scooters.

So that was the last I heard.

I did my graduate research there at Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, so I know them well.

But yeah, they're well known for doing what's called naturalistic studies, where they put cameras on things, cameras in cars, cameras in trucks, cameras on motorcycles, and now cameras on scooters.

So about a third of the scooters have cameras and GPS on them,

so they can track them.

They paused the study for COVID and they're relaunching it, I think, when the snow is gone.

And I believe they're running it through May.

And then I think they got an extension on the study so they can analyze data beyond, I think, probably till December.

It takes a long time because they're literally going through video.

a lot of boring video, but looking for incidents like people jumping off curbs or wrecking or or natural behavior.

What do you do in a natural environment?

How do you park them?

That kind of stuff.

I don't know the details, but I know they're trying to get people because people don't know the cameras are there.

They forget about it or they don't get feedback on it.

So they really don't realize it.

It's in the app.

It tells you you're being recorded, but a lot of people don't pay attention.

So I'm sure there'll be a rich data set of video that they'll be going through.

And as far as I know, you're right.

It's the only and first video study of its type.

It's a pretty big study, like $400,000.

I mean, it's a big deal, but it's been heavily delayed because of COVID.

And so I think the jury's out as to what, they're not gonna say anything until it's all done.

They're not gonna give you any recommendations until it's done, I'm sure.

Now, I did notice that the scooters are different.

It's like a second generation with bigger wheels.

And so when they brought them back the second time,

Maybe it was a spin company, which is owned by Ford, decided to bring back a different scooter slightly.

So it's a bigger, beefier scooter.

But I think the technology on it is probably the same.

But besides that, you have to talk to Mike Mullenauer, who's at Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

He could probably give you updates if there's any available.

Thank you.

And the short version is the town does not want them right now until this study is done and the recommendations are there.

They've learned from other cities that I think, as you know, if they're on the sidewalk blocking wheelchairs and everything else, it's just a mess.

And they're bad enough on campus.

But we have collaborated with them some.

They used to park them in our bike racks for our bike share system.

So we politely asked them not to do that.

And they've been good with that.

Interesting.

I would be interested in knowing when that report is complete and seeing it.

It would be fascinating.

Other questions from folks?

Don't be shy.

This is your chance.

Oh, OK. My question, I guess, is I noted in looking through things about Blacksburg transit

that you all got a bunch of electric buses nine months ago.

I was told that we have five that are out there, which is true.

I've seen them.

So we have five buses, two are 60 foot buses and three are 35 foot buses.

The infrastructure, as you can imagine, is very challenging.

So we're learning a lot about that.

And of course, the biggest cost besides the buses is the, you know, out of the hub station, electric charging stations.

So that's a big deal.

I don't know the whole numbers, but I think the buses are each around a million dollars.

I mean, they're pretty big, pretty expensive.

And the money we got for it was given with the string that eventually we will go all electric with all the buses.

So that's the caveat with the grant funding we got.

And that might take 14 years because as you know, a bus, the life of a bus is 12 years typically.

And we just bought a bunch of new buses two years ago.

So we have a good 10 more years to go before we have to get any more buses.

But I know I just went through the capital plan recently.

I know that

It's not on the internet.

It's gotta be true.

And I haven't talked to my director about this one recently, or our ITS guy, who's really the,

Tim Whitten is the manager of that program mainly.

And with COVID and with everything else, things have gotten slowed down a lot.

Construction in the area has really been behind.

So I know that slowed things down somewhat.

And then frankly, we are having trouble just like you probably.

We are about 34, 35 drivers short right now.

And just in admin staff, we're 10 short.

We have

Four mechanics missing right now.

And we are consolidating buses routes almost every day.

So we have days where we don't have enough buses and enough drivers.

And so asking for 15 new shiny electric buses is probably not going to be top priority if if things, you know, if we don't have people to drive them.

On the other hand, a 60 foot bus can carry a lot more people than a 40 foot bus.

That's a big thing, too.

Whether it's electric or not doesn't matter.

But the bigger buses have been really popular in our area.

That's a little digression there.

But yeah, I'll find out more when I can about the updates on that.

But I would think that articles within a couple years at least.

Exactly.

There you go.

It's the same as true with cars.

Yes.

Yeah, it's stout and we have a,

Whole separate division for access.

It's called access in this area.

And of course, it's federally mandated.

So in town of Blacksburg only, we have paratransit service.

I don't know the numbers exactly, but I think they do something like 150 trips a day.

And as you imagine, it's very time intensive.

It takes longer to pick up somebody, to coordinate the call,

We have a lot of regulars who have regular standing trips, but if a medical appointment gets canceled, then it closes the spot for somebody else.

It's hard to do same day service or same day requests sometimes because of that.

And then the same thing, we're having trouble getting enough drivers.

So it's affecting, and paratransit is a whole other level of training.

Driving a fixed bus is one thing, but not everyone gets trained on both systems.

They get introduced to both,

the paratransit vehicles and the fixed route buses in their initial training but it's additional training if you want to do paratransit full-time or part-time.

It doesn't really answer your question how I can get you some numbers on all that but I know with COVID it's been very challenging because for a long time we had a limit of you know four passengers we rarely have more than two on a paratransit vehicle anyway so usually that was fine but it does make it challenging when you're having to deal with getting a person on and off a vehicle

that may need close contact.

But the other thing, how we do is in Christianburg, we have a go anywhere service, which is a, it's not really paratransit, it's open to anybody, but it works very similarly in that you call ahead and it's a similar kind of vehicle.

The reason for that in Christianburg is because partly the terrain, but also it was an elegant way for funding to happen to allow a paratransit-like service to happen

in a region that you couldn't really afford.

We can't do fixed route in that area very well anyways.

And for the first 15 years, we didn't do fixed route at all, except this town to town thing.

Yeah, it's definitely a demand response.

Yeah.

We don't use micro transit very much around here, but that's what it is.

Yeah.

It's like an on demand.

Yep.

And then how we do have one or two small vehicles.

Now we have a, I think we have two vans and they have the rear entry for a wheelchair, but I think it only holds six people.

So it's a smaller thing we're experimenting with.

It's a lot easier for, in some ways because it's not 32 feet long.

and the price is a little lower.

Thank you.

Do you have any more questions?

Are you good?

I will send Eric an email if I have other things I want to know.

Yeah, definitely.

Other questions, folks?

Looking for hands up?

I got it.

Eric, does Blacksburg Transit have any routes that are basically serving

We don't have any parking, we have one parking ride.

It's a shared stop with SmartWay bus at exit 118.

But it's actually operated by VDOT, the property.

but it's shared with the Valley Metro.

Most people who, most people park there though are not getting our bus.

They're getting, you know, the SmartWay bus.

They may transfer from SmartWay to our bus but I don't think people are getting dropped off there to go to campus very often.

And then we do have a couple other unofficial places.

We have one in Christianburg which is,

which got funded recently.

So that should be happening in the next couple of years, but it's something like 56 spaces.

So it's at this step in the direction of that, but, but it wouldn't be transit exclusively.

Okay.

Yeah.

Smartway by Valley Metro does that, but we, we don't like your transit does not.

We're 90% students.

So 90% of our people are within three miles of campus, probably.

So Eric, I just want to make sure I'm clear.

Help me with that.

I couldn't say that.

I mean, I've talked so broadly.

So, so we operate paratransit because we're, you know, we're required to, but we have a separate division that does that.

But you know, Pulaski Area Transit is a different system.

Bradford Transit is a different system.

The SmartWay is a different system.

They're all separate, but I as a regional

Yeah.

We do not have an authority.

There's been some talk of it.

But as you can imagine, a lot of us are pretty married to where we've been for 25 years.

And it will be a tough sell to convince the town of Christianburg and the town of Blackburg to

basically dissolve those departments and become a single authority.

Yeah, the MPO and the Regional Commission as well work together really well.

And that's the glue that kind of ties things together, I think.

And of course, we have a great relationship with DRPT and our regional folks.

They're on every call that we do with the MPO.

And that was a great idea to have them all the same at the same time.

That was really sweet.

Have you always been or is that just been since COVID?

Okay.

Yeah, no, I think

I'm sorry.

We're good.

I literally have not been on the bus for two years.

So I don't know.

I don't think that to show anything right now.

Right.

I'm talking about before COVID.

They pay ahead of time.

Correct.

The only people that pay are people who don't have a pass of some type.

If you're a local person and you got a monthly pass, then you show your monthly pass or you put in your 50 cents.

That's my understanding, yeah.

Yeah, it's just not, it doesn't work.

Yeah, and that's what we're figuring out too.

And I have one more question.

I'm not trying to interrupt because if anybody else, if any of you all have a question, please put your hand up.

Not through us, you can't.

They have their own motor pool.

So they have a couple of vehicles.

They have mostly vans and cars that staff can use.

It's not federally funded.

There's a long history there of chartering, which I know is

basically been gone with, but football games or football shuttles are kind of on the verge of the same issue.

And there'll probably be a day when that might be chartered out, too.

I don't know how that's going to work, but we have to run our football shuttles on the same route as a regular route because it has to be a regular route.

The fact that there's a football game is kind of coincidental.

It's an elegant workaround as well.

And again, I may be getting to a political issue here now, but

Well, you figured out a way to accommodate it, and that's what I was getting at.

Yeah, and I think that's fair for you now, too.

Right.

And I'm just curious with your pupil transportation system, your school system.

Are they still completely separate like high school, middle school, elementary school for the city of Blacksburg?

Yeah, they're completely separate.

I've made some meager attempts to reach out to them to coordinate things a little better because we had requests for expanding our routes to go to the high school, that kind of thing.

There's an issue because it goes into the county and we don't service the county currently.

And that's part of it.

We go through it from Christianburg to Blacksburg, but we don't really service the county at all.

All right.

That's good.

Any other questions?

I know we're over time just a little bit.

Any other questions before we this has been wonderful.

I've really enjoyed it.

I know other folks have as well.

And you can you can do this.

You don't have to deep dive into this, certainly.

But you know, as the regional body here on the call, I would love for you to share, you know, with the regional collaboration between whether it's the transit agencies or the stakeholders, you know, you've already shared that one of the challenges was drivers and staff vacancies.

Are there any other challenges or hurdles that you guys have had to overcome?

in order to get to where you are collaborating in a region.

Well, I would say we've had the same MPO director, what I think Neil would know, 18 years.

Dan Brew has been the same director.

So that helps a lot when you have the same person involved.

And then Kevin Bird,

has been on staff at the regional commission for I think 13 years.

And he's been director for eight or nine years now.

And his predecessor was there for 30 years and he basically worked under him.

So we've had the two, the PDC, the regional commission and the MPO working together with the same people for quite a long time, which really, really helps.

They have that corporate history and they have the ability to on a phone call, make decisions quickly.

and Bluntly, you know, if they need to.

And then both Kevin and Dan are both get it done kind of people.

So I say that win has always been there.

And it got even better when Kevin became director just because he was ready to make some changes that were needed and continue the collaboration with the MPO.

I've been a frog boiling in water for 10 years because like I said at the beginning, Blackford Transit was the only thing in town.

That's all.

My job is funded by the town and the MPO, which is a weird, unique situation.

So I work at Blackford Transit, but I serve both the director here and the director of the MPO, technically.

And financially, I'm three quarters MPO and one quarter of town.

but that was set up that way because I think originally the town of Blackburg only had Blackford Transit and the region only had Blacksburg Transit.

So it's slowly migrated to include Bradford Transit and then Pulaski Area Transit and then the SmartWay and now Virginia Breeze a little bit and then you know whatever else DRPT is going to be and now rail which is exciting.

I'm not really answering your question but I think the winds have really been just and even at staff I think our youngest manager has been here 12 years

No, that's helpful.

I think the biggest challenge probably has just been COVID, just communicating during COVID.

There's still a lot of us like me who don't want to meet anybody in person.

And there's a lot of people who don't mind it at all.

But I think there's a lot of people who are happy on Zoom.

And I think that's going to be the way for a while.

That's a digression too.

Okay, any other last questions?

Because we are going to need to move on.

Eric, I really appreciate you joining us.

Thank you very, very much.

This was wonderful.

That's great.

Okay, thank you and stay safe.

We appreciate your time.

Yes, sir.

Our next agenda item is the resolution to support the application to DRPT for the technical assistance grant.

And we're going to need to take a vote on this.

So Lucinda, I'm going to turn this one over to you to get us started.

I'm going to share my screen.

I have seven slides.

It should go pretty quickly.

So in your packet, you'll find a resolution to support a grant application for the governance study.

A lot of you are already familiar with this, but some of you aren't, so I'm going to go through all of it.

The Regional Transit Vision Plan in our last Regional Transit Partnership meeting, we had a presentation on it and the consultants discussed a need to generate additional funding to support the community's transit vision.

In addition to that, TJPDC has studies dating back to 2005 that suggest the community develop a structure to support regional transportation services

which the Regional Transit Partnership is considered a first step in forming a regional authority to meet these needs.

And a governance study will recommend the appropriate governance structure and revenue sources to move the transit priorities forward.

So it's kind of like the next step.

After the Transit Vision Studies recommendation last month, the

TJ PDC staff spoke with DRPT staff and we reviewed the past studies and other resources on the history of transit authority attempts in our community.

We reviewed Central Virginia Transportation Authority's governance study and met with their staff to discuss their process and how their study worked.

We also met with Kat John and Albemarle County staff and decided to pursue a DRPT technical assistance grant to conduct a governance study to recommend the appropriate governance structure to support a regional transit vision.

So it, you know, we're looking towards some form of a regional authority, but we don't want to make the conclusion before we have a study to make sure that that's exactly what we needed for our area.

You'll find a copy of the scope of work for the governance study in your agenda packet.

We consulted with DRPT, Albemarle County, Charlottesville, and John Staff as we developed the scope of work.

Everybody had time to review it and provide comments and we made quite a few revisions.

The study is going to review our existing transit governance structures.

Investigate successful structures in peer communities, identify additional revenue sources for transit, develop alternative governance structures, and then evaluate those alternative governance structures and make a recommendation on the most appropriate governance structure to increase and improve transit services in the Thomas Jefferson region.

Just as we had engaged the transit stakeholders during the development of the scope of work, stakeholders will continue to be engaged during the study.

There'll be multiple presentations at RTP meetings and individual meetings with the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle, Green, Fluvanna, Louisa, and Nelson Counties, and also with the service providers, CAT, JOT, and UTS staff.

The rural counties may not have traditional transit services,

But there's a need for transportation for people who can't drive in those areas.

And we want to include the rural areas from the very beginning to try and have the recommended government structure include rural counties as well.

So we drafted the scope of work and distributed it to VDOT's bench consultants in December.

We received two excellent proposals in January and we will convene a selection committee and notify the chosen team in February and March.

The DRPT grant application is due in a few days at the end of the month and notices to proceed will be awarded in July.

So if we are awarded the grant, it will be an 18 month project and it will start in August of 2022 ending in January of 2024.

The total project cost is estimated at $180,000.

There's a 50% match requirement and the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County are contributing part of the match.

And we're asking the MPO to contribute $25,000 and the PDC will contribute $5,000.

The slide might be a little different.

And so that's the total for a $90,000 match.

which we're really grateful that Albemarle County and the city of Charlottesville were able to help support that.

Let's open it up.

And again, I can't see anybody.

Maybe take your presentation down.

We can pull it back up if we need to, Lucinda.

Thank you, dear.

That was great.

This is

This is real, after five years of work, this is really the next step for us.

And looking at how to move transit forward in the future.

And I really, I have read now over the last six weeks, I've read this draft scope of, or maybe four weeks, I don't know.

But anyway, I've read this draft scope of work twice, and it is, it's not terribly long, but it has some great information in it.

And I know we have new folks on the screen

If you haven't had a chance to read it, and for those of you, it is really worth a read.

I learned a lot just about Albemarle County in this scope of work and I really appreciate the work that went into this document because it's easy to read, it's short, it's concise, and I appreciate that very much.

So Christine and Lucinda, I guess I'm going to open up for questions.

But at the end of the day, we're asking folks to support or approve the resolution that was in our packet.

Yes.

Okay.

And what this actually says is that the

This is to determine the most effective governance structure needed to implement recommendations from the Regional Transit Visioning Plan.

And the TJPD staff are going to serve as the project managers and facilitators.

And this work will come back to this body fairly often, I understand, according to the scope of work.

We'll be seeing this work back again.

And of course, there is a local match, which you just talked about.

and the local match is over a two-year period for 23 and 24.

But that's how long the study's gonna take essentially?

Yes.

Yes, okay, I wasn't clear on that.

So let me open it up for questions.

So thank you and I appreciate getting the scope and everything.

I did have a question you know as the project proceeds just a clarification really and a hope that

When we think about university transit as an operator, that's one thing.

But when you talk about UVA's governance structure where, you know, the study is going to be talking about governance and bringing people who are bringing entities that are not Charlottesville or Albemarle into the discussion that UVA's more governance type leadership is included in the discussions as opposed to the humble operator.

So I would just be sure that that gets, as the project unfolds, and I'm sure it'll be that way.

TJPC has been very inclusive all through this, but just reading through the scope and such, I wanted to be sure that there's an understanding that there's UTSC operator and there's UVA's governance that is very different.

We're buddies, but

Just wanted to point that out.

Can I see Christine nodding her head?

No, no, I don't.

But that's resonating with me for sure.

We got it.

It's good.

Any other comments or questions?

This is pretty exciting, I think.

I'm excited about this, so it's all good.

Well, if there aren't any comments or questions or objections, then I think we need a motion to approve and a second.

So would anybody?

Then the motion would be, I believe,

to support the technical assistance grant to fund a transit governance study for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District.

Is that correct?

I think so.

I was typing a note to myself to make sure that I went through and read the language related to the UVA governance.

Yes.

Excellent, Lloyd.

Is there a second?

Second.

And the second was from B, I believe.

Yep.

OK, thank you, dear.

So Lucinda, let's go on and vote on this.

We don't have a lot of votes, but let's vote.

Yes.

Supervisor LePisto-Curtley?

Yes.

He said yes.

He's waving his hand.

Ms. White?

Yes.

That's everybody.

That's good.

That's got the voters.

All right.

Thank you.

So we now have our resolution passed.

This is exciting.

And I show on my watch that we have about 30 minutes here.

So let's move on to our transit provider updates.

All right, thank you.

I think everybody is doing the same thing.

We're struggling with COVID with staffing issues, both in the office and on the street.

We're managing, but it's a tough going.

I do want to mention that we are

looking at some proposals to do a jurisdictional cost allocation model for John.

As you know, we operate in multiple counties in the city of Charlottesville and we need probably a better way to distribute our costs among the different funding partners.

And so we're going to work on that and that cost model might be beneficial to a future partnership.

Real quickly, I just want to say Garland, I hope I'm not speaking out of school here.

Me and Garland had a great meeting today.

We've identified some possible areas where we might collaborate.

I'm very excited about finding opportunities for our two groups to work together.

Nothing that we can really share right now that's concrete, but I really enjoyed our conversation today, Garland.

I'm very hopeful that we can have a lot more collaboration in the future.

Great.

Any questions for Ted?

Anybody have any questions?

I know Ted has also had an opportunity to introduce himself to DRPT.

Yeah.

And that's fine.

It's all good.

Thanks.

And the next one, Charmaine White, Albemarle County Public Schools, Pupil Transportation.

Yes.

Hello to everybody.

I'm new to the group, of course.

But in Albemarle, we are pretty much struggling with COVID and trying to recruit drivers and

There are some things that I have put on the table.

I was mentioning to Garland yesterday in a meeting that I want to reach out to see whether or not we can basically help each other.

I have some ideas on the table with satellite stops and to see whether or not is that workable and whether we can somehow another partner together to get our children to school.

So that's where we are.

We're also working on what I like to say is a mega job fair wherein we want to have boots on the ground.

And what boots on the ground means is that I've learned over the years that our drivers are our best recruiters.

So we want them to go out and reach out to their families, to their friends, cousins, anybody that they know and ask them whether or not do they want to drive a school bus?

Do they love working with children?

And so if so, come on over.

We would certainly like to train you and get you certified to drive a school bus.

So that's what we're doing right now in Albemarle Transportation.

Thank you.

Do you have a date for the fair or do you want to?

Not yet.

We're in the planning stage of it.

We're going to start pushing some things out.

We have another meeting on February the 4th.

And from that meeting, then we're going to start putting a date out there and passing the word along so that you can share it with friends and family and everybody you know.

Great.

All right.

Becca, you're next.

All right.

Thank you.

So enough news from UTS is that when the academic session restarted on January the 19th last week, so we are eight days into it, we did introduce a new delivery model for service that combines a fixed route, that's very compact fixed route,

complemented by an on-demand service.

So this is partly in response to really just providing better service to the people using our transit service between 10 p.m. and midnight each night, but is also trying to address the efficiency issues that we're all trying to address with our driver shortages.

We, like everybody else, have about 30% of our driver positions are vacant.

about 17 positions vacant out of 52.

So this is one of those win-wins we hope.

We just launched it last Wednesday.

It's a new delivery model for the 10 p.m. to midnight, which I know not many people on this call are riding the bus at that hour, but a lot of our students are.

It's our first foray into that.

And we hope to have a lot of good information back about

lessons learned on implementing both a fixed route and a complimentary on demand or microtransit or whatever you want to call it.

Interesting.

Thank you.

Any questions for I don't remember if I asked about Charmaine, but any questions about the last three report outs?

All right, Garland, it's your turn.

So I've had great conversations with Ted and with Charmaine.

I need to have a follow up with Charmaine.

We do need to touch base here really soon.

I would say Ted and I's conversation there was really productive.

Looking forward to continuing that open line of communication.

I think there is potential synergies there where we could

Kat and John can definitely complement each other and we're looking forward to seeing how we can further those tides and really move the system forward.

Like every other transit system, Kat has been really hit by COVID.

We have had some real issues with actually just putting basic service on the road.

And hopefully in the next couple of weeks when we get this last

push of this Omicron virus that our system will get a little better, a little stronger.

We are still down about 12 drivers that need to, some of them have switched job duties from full-time to part-time, which is putting pressures on our system.

Some have not.

Afghan, like I mentioned during my speech to the,

City Council have not returned to us.

And then so we're still trying to recruit as hot and heavy as we possibly can.

We're recruiting for transit, we're recruiting for our pupil.

And the goal is hopefully we wanted to put in a lot of optimization recommendations that came out from Kimley-Horn and Connect Transportation Group.

We're going to have to, instead of doing it all at once, we're going to probably have to phase it in.

It causes a little more issues to do that because of the way the system is designed for the connections.

But I know Peter's over there, and we've had conversations trying to get the extensions to the center.

That is one of the ones that we are focusing on.

So whenever we can try to phase that in, we're going to do it as soon as we possibly can.

But I also would say that I believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

We're going to be increasingly recruiting hot and heavy.

Rebecca has put some more pressure on us by raising their salaries over in the university.

That's not a bad thing for the transit industry.

It just puts a little more pressure on us to do the same.

So I welcome that.

And I know the drivers will welcome that because it affects their paychecks.

In the short term, we're just trying to get through this and weather the storm.

Long term is, I do see CAT getting, hopefully in our budget, we've asked for additional drivers.

We have to get additional drivers to make the numbers work.

And if the long-term approach is to go to, I talked about a potentially 15-minute system, that's going to take a significant capital outlay and it's going to take a significant increase in drivers.

So I welcome those conversations about doing just that.

The last thing is, Alomar County has given the go-ahead for CAT to apply for a microtransit study.

And I believe, hopefully, with a little luck, we're going to be successful in getting the funding to launch this project in the start of next year.

Yeah, I was going to say on the school side.

We are hot and heavy recruiting.

We've got four in the pipeline.

We're still short.

We've got 13, we need 30.

So we're still about halfway where we need to be.

Our recruiting efforts, you will start to see some

start to hear some radio ads coming out next month.

And then a couple of print ads that will probably start another couple of weeks.

So we're working through that.

Need to talk about raising the base fare for bus drivers also.

So that's another part of the conversation that's got to happen.

But the long-term goal there is to get to 40 to give a little cushion

to allow us to be more proactive when school routes get delayed.

We'd be able to react and have additional drivers, an additional bus to send out as opposed to waiting 35, 40 minutes and causing the issue where kids not getting to school on time.

So that's the ultimate goal.

Looking forward to doing some, if we can, some collaborative things with Albemarle County.

Our buses pass each other every single day.

We're happy to provide the coffee.

Yes, or if you and Charmaine make a lot of progress, we will gladly provide something a little stronger.

So my question is regarding the microtransit, the projects that we have going in 29 North and Pantops, that's already set, correct?

And I think you're ordering the buses and those are gonna be ready in December, is that correct?

No, that's the project I was talking about.

Right, no, I know that.

We have to apply.

We're hopeful that we'll have a strong application.

So I'm going to go ahead and claim it and say that we're going to win it.

OK.

OK. Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think you should hold B to her offer, Garland and Sharon.

Any other questions?

All right, then let's move on.

We have other updates.

Yes, thank you so much.

This will be nice and quick, but I want to always make sure that we take the time to update everyone here at the RTP regarding the Afton Express, since that does impact a lot of our commuters in the area.

And so Afton Express launched in September and has been

running throughout the weeks since then, and we are seeing great numbers but are still looking to increase that ridership.

We definitely did see the expected downturn in riders over the Christmas holiday with UVA being closed for, you know,

academic side being closed for a couple of weeks.

And that definitely saw that that turn in that ridership as well.

And so all of this is giving them great information to think about the best overall structure of the bus service.

And they are still looking at potentially

making some small changes to the schedule and later in this year looking more at how they can accommodate the health system side at UVA and those differing schedules which are often you know the 7 to 7 or 11 to 11 but no decisions have been made or started as of yet

We are also continuing to spread the word, tell everyone you know about Acton Express.

We will be doing some outreach events at UVA at some of those

parking satellite parking lots with folks that are utilizing those.

And then we will also be doing some digital marketing that will be targeted on specific areas around the stops for Afton Express.

So folks who are moving in and out of those corridors will get some additional information.

So that's all I have for Afton Express.

Certainly entertain any questions.

Real quickly, Rideshare, we are much like all of the transit providers applying for our annual grants.

So we have our operating grant that funds the operation of the Rideshare program for the fiscal year.

And then in addition, DRPT has now set up

were called CAPS programs or Commuter Assistance Programs to do strategic plans in a very similar fashion to how the transit agencies do their strategic plans.

So we will be applying for some technical assistance potentially to work through that as we get more information through DRPT with their schedules.

Any questions?

If not,

Then we'll move to Sandy.

Yes, ma'am.

The MPO policy board met last night and they did approve support from the MPO for the transit governance study at that meeting.

So that funding has been secured and will show up on the work program for

FY23.

Otherwise, we're still spending, the majority of our initiatives right now are really still focused around preparing for smart scale applications which will open up on March 1st.

We've been having many stakeholder committee meetings about the Ravana

bike ped bridge crossing, and I got in touch with Jawan this week just to talk about what transit connections might look like at either of the bridge landing sites, specifically on the side of the Woolen Mills area, because the Pantops areas, the two landing sites are very close to each other, so there wouldn't be a significant difference there.

But looking at what future opportunities might be for

improve transit connections that either of those sites might exist.

So Juwan and I will need to connect a little bit later to just talk about how we can incorporate that as part of the discussion.

Otherwise, we will be planning to have some public meetings for the SmartScale projects in early March.

And we will also have a separate meeting specifically for the Ravana Bike Ped project probably later in February, as well as developing a survey to send out for the public just to get a little bit of some broader feedback about what some preferences would be for how to prioritize different factors for consideration.

and selecting which of those alignments to move forward.

So the MPO will be having a separately scheduled meeting date to be determined in early March, just to review all that information, help them make a decision about which alignment they would like to move forward with at their policy board meeting.

on March 23rd.

When they're ready, just keep in mind that, for example, Bea and I, all the supervisors have citizens advisory committees.

If you can channel those that survey to us, right, we'll make sure that our citizens advisory committees are aware of them.

It might just be a good way to reach another group of folks right in the county.

Sure.

And with any questions for Sandy?

Yeah, so as you know, Albemarle County Transit Expansion Study is one of RTP's transit studies that we're conducting.

And as Garland shared, the study recommended implementing micro transit service for the Pantops and the Route 29 area.

They also recommended it for the

Thank you for the Monticello area, however, not right away kind of second phase.

So the study is helping CAT with the application and they will be, they're writing their final report right now.

So at our next RTP meeting on February 24th, they will present to the committee their final recommendations and their final report.

So that will be on our agenda for our next meeting on February 24th, which is pretty exciting to hear.

Okay.

All right.

And I noticed that Neil's not, Neil, did you have an update for us?

We usually have an update from BRPT.

I'm here.

I'm sorry.

The internet wasn't working well, but I'm on the phone, but I guess the biggest thing is that

All of our grants are due at the end of the day on February 1st.

So it's been quite a struggle since all of their websites have been and online grants have been compromised.

And so everybody's been working very hard, the grantees and our staff, just to help get the grants in for next week.

Great.

All right.

Well, I know a lot of the state systems have been down, so it's been a problem.

With that, I know I don't have any other business.

Does anyone on the committee or anyone on, you know, any of the members want to bring up any additional business or items to discuss?

Well, if not, I very rarely have pushback when I get you, when I adjourn us early.

So our next meeting is February the 24th.

And we are, I will go on and adjourn us.

And I hope you all have a good couple of weeks.

Stay safe.

Be careful of the storm that I believe is coming through.

And we are adjourned.

And thanks for the new folks.

We appreciate you guys being here.

Thank you.