Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   5/26/2022

All right.

Welcome, everyone.

This is the Thursday, May 26 meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership.

And we're glad everybody is here.

I see lots of faces on the screen.

And my first order of business, as you know, is to read.

It's upside down.

I have to turn it right side up.

Read the notice of electronic meeting.

This meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia 2.2-3708.2, which allows public bodies 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 lawful, 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 through notice at the TJPDC offices to the media, website postings and agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

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

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

All right.

And with that, I'm gonna ask Lucinda if she will call the roll and take attendance for us.

So we're official.

Supervisor Lipisto-Curtley from Albemarle County.

Here.

Mr. Sherman from the DRPT.

There he is.

OK.

Counselor Pinkston from the city of Charlottesville.

Ms. White from UVA.

And Kendall, are you here for Ms. White?

OK.

Present.

Ms. White from Albemarle School System.

Present.

Oh, okay.

Mr. Thompson is here.

Hey, we thought you weren't going to be here today.

That's good.

Good to see you or hear you.

Ms. Pennington from Rideshare.

Present.

Ms. Shackelford from the MPO.

Sandy is out on maternity leave.

Great.

Thank you, Lucinda.

We have our crew and more.

Let me see, the next item on our agenda is to actually approve the agenda.

All right, that was Lloyd with the motion to approve the agenda.

Thank you, Hal.

All right.

Any abstentions?

Any nays?

All right.

We have an agenda.

And the next item that we need to vote on is the draft of the meeting minutes.

These are the April the 28th minutes.

And I did find just one little small edit that I wanted to mention, and then

Anybody else that has any?

On page two, there's a little bit of a disconnect and it may have just been me, but we talked about the meeting in person happening in June, our first in-person meeting in June.

And within the language, the first line says the next meeting will be in person.

So I would like to change the word next to June just for clarity, just so it's clear.

And are there any other catches or edits?

If not, I would love to have a motion to approve the minutes.

I move.

Thank you, B.

Second from Lloyd.

You all are a good tag team.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right, who is that?

No, Supervisor McKeel, just can I go ahead and say at the beginning of the meeting, if you are not speaking, if you can mute your microphone so that we can avoid any feedback.

We do have almost 40 people on the meeting and probably adding more as we go.

Well, I'm thrilled we're popular today.

I think that's a great sign.

But it probably is best if everybody mutes so we don't have a lot of interference.

So I think we now have the minutes approved.

And Lucinda, did you want to take on the July meeting piece?

Who wants to talk about that?

So in July, we traditionally don't have a meeting.

Oh, and we need to take a motion to vote on that.

OK. Well, I guess it's up to you.

I mean, I don't think we had to vote on it, but I mean, I don't care if we want to vote on it.

It's fine.

So we're canceling the July.

Regional Transit Partnership meeting, but it looks like to me the MPO meeting is going to happen.

Is that correct?

Yes.

Okay, so we had a little blurb on our agenda page.

The July MPO meeting will have a presentation from the Association of MPOs on federal funding opportunities from Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which could be very informative for those folks that

deal with our federal funding.

Exciting.

All right.

Great.

Thank you, Bea.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right, that was unanimous not to have a meeting in July, so that's great.

And I think you also have the remote participation policy listed, Christine and Lucinda, under this.

Do you all want to speak to that?

Because that probably needs a vote for sure.

And we've been approving these at all the meetings as we've been going through and I've forgotten where we've approved them and not, but that's a really good point.

We have to have a forum to approve the members that would be participating remotely.

So just for everybody to remember that.

All right, so are there any questions about that?

Anybody have any questions?

All right, Lucinda, do we have any matters from the public?

Yeah, I do see we have some people from the public.

Yes, so Emily has raised her hand and

All right.

Good afternoon.

My name is Dr. Emily Yen.

I'm a resident of the City of Charlottesville.

I strongly support expanding CAT service.

However, I have some concerns about the implementation of the transportation plan.

I strongly believe that this plan is only possible to implement if there are enough bus drivers working at CAT who choose to stick around.

And as the CAT bus drivers have brought to both the city council and as well as your board in Charlottesville, as well as this board, they have concerns about the wage scale.

and wish to have collective bargaining rights.

I believe that granting collective bargaining rights, which the City of Charlottesville would be the entity that would have to do this, is absolutely important to implement them now.

as well as increasing the wages for cat bus drivers.

I believe this would be the most expeditious way for improving service as well as working conditions in tandem.

Thank you, Emily.

Yeah, Katana from C3.

Hello, yeah, just briefly, I would like to, first of all, thank you for the opportunity of speaking for this very important work of the transit vision.

One small suggestion, I know it's a huge one, but for the future, I think that it would be extremely useful if community input could be provided perhaps at the beginning and a moment at the ending of this meeting as well.

or even just at the end of the presentations because usually it's very difficult for us to make relevant comments to the topic that's going to be presented in a day if we can only talk before the presentation happens and then perhaps the moment that we have the opportunity to talk next month, the presenters are not going to be here to listen to our feedback and questions.

So I would like to express my desire to either allow questions from the community to be

dropped in the chat during the presentation or for a moment of community questions afterwards.

It would be very important for community involvement in the process.

And other than that, thanks so much for doing that.

I think that I hope that as we move forward, we can also consider the climate goals that the county and the city have

and how we can achieve this transit vision in a way that's very, very connected and integrated with other goals that our community have, such as the climate goals, which require cleaner transforms of transit and very careful choice of few options for the buses and types of systems, not only fix the roads.

And thank you very much, Katana.

And if you just email us your comments, we'll make sure they're part of our records today for the minutes, like we always do.

Anyone else, Lucinda?

I don't see anyone else.

Yeah, I don't either.

OK. All right.

I think we're good then.

So now we'll get to the meat of our meeting, right?

The exciting part is our presentation.

and we have representatives from the consulting group we've been working with.

Lucinda, do you want to introduce them?

Yeah.

So I, I would like to thank Albemarle County, the city of Charlottesville and the TJPDC O and DRPT for supporting the regional transit vision plan.

And tonight we have our consultant team Mr. Tim Bruel.

from AECOM and Mr. Scutterwag from Jarrett Walker and Sue Schultz.

Welcome, folks.

We appreciate you being here, and we're excited to see this.

We did have a copy, by the way, of the presentation, I think, Tim, in our packet.

There's a lot of information and thank you all for having us and we're excited to give this update.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen to bring up the presentation.

Now we have it, thank you.

Good, okay.

Again, thank you to the RTP for having our team to present an update on the transit vision.

My name is Tim Bruhl.

I am the project manager from AECOM leading the team together.

Today we have Scudder Wag from Jared Walker and Associates and Will Cockrell from EPR and they'll be helping us, helping me provide the update to the study.

So here's an agenda for our presentation.

We'll go over a brief background of kind of where we've been of the study and kind of where we are in the process.

We'll have a brief discussion on the transit vision statement goals and objectives.

And that was a document that was shared with this group at last month's April meeting.

The meat of our presentation will be on the vision concepts that our team has developed and Scudder will lead that presentation.

And then we'll go over our strategy for sort of the phase two of our stakeholder engagement, which includes the public as well.

And then throughout and at the end of each section, we'll have an opportunity for questions and discussion.

So please hold your questions until that time where we have those breaks or raise your hand to make sure we call on you.

So the project is a collaborative effort to evaluate and establish a clear long-term vision for transit service in the region.

So not just the urbanized area, but also the rural areas surrounding Charlottesville, Albemarle County.

The study is led by the TJPDC and funded in part by DRPT and by the local jurisdictions.

As you can see in the process, study process graphic,

We are approaching the end of our project where we have developed our draft network concepts and are soliciting that input and evaluating those outcomes.

Our project is slated to end sort of the end of the summer, just for a general timeline.

So August, September timeframe.

So I do want to make a note that this the transit vision study is different from the upcoming transit governance study that you may have heard of.

So the transit vision study, as I mentioned, will conclude this summer just as the transit governance study commences.

And the focus of the vision study is really identifying those potential improvements to the regional transit system, whereas the focus of the transit governance study is sort of the governance of regional transit

and how might the region implement the transit vision that we are defining as part of this study.

So, so just to recap some work, the work to date.

The project website here listed at the link here is probably the best place to find the detailed information on the study, including the intermediate work products and previous meeting summaries.

And just to recap what we've done thus far.

So we did, as the project commenced in the fall of 2021, we've completed the transit propensity and land use analyses.

as sort of the background of the region.

We had the stakeholder coordination in fall 2021, which we presented to this group here.

And then during that time, fall to winter, we did have our public engagement phase one, which included a public survey and a virtual public meeting at that time.

I believe that we also passed along the summary of the phase one efforts at the last April meeting.

And also recently in March 2022, we drafted our vision statement memo.

And so that incorporated the feedback that we got from the earlier stakeholder and public

engagement efforts, as well as some of our findings from the transit propensity and land use analyses.

Also in March 2022, we did sit down with the service providers in the in the region, Jaunt and CAT, to really go over the

the service needs and the priorities to develop the vision network that we'll be presenting today.

So as a recap to the transit vision statement, so as I mentioned, we distributed this memo in the last RTP meeting last month in April.

And so we do want to get this opportunity to to discuss that document and what we've presented in that document.

Specifically, our proposed vision statement.

on the screen here, and I'll go ahead and read it out.

This was the culmination of our initial research and our work products and those outreach efforts.

So, to develop, design, and provide transit in the Charlottesville area in a manner that reflects a collaborative, inclusive, and equitable process

representing needs in both urban and rural areas.

This transit system expands opportunities for all residents, equity, reduces reliance on automobiles, multimodality, and helps protect the environment, climate change mitigation.

And so, as I mentioned, this was a public and stakeholder led effort to identify those transit priorities and other regional priorities and goals for the region.

Sort of the main themes that bubbled up in our process was equity.

And so we define that as expand opportunities for all residents and represents the needs of both urban and rural communities.

You know, when talking about transit, we understand that the transit solutions are differing between those two types of communities.

The second is multimodality.

So reduce reliance on automobiles.

So this includes not just expanding transit, but also providing better land use connections and pedestrian and bicycle multimodal connections to transit.

And climate change.

So obviously,

The region has some climate change priorities that we feel transit can help address and help protect the environment.

So along with the vision statement, we did establish some goals, objectives, and measures to track progress towards achieving the transit vision across different timeframes.

Those different timeframes are the immediate, which we are evaluating as part of this transit vision plan study.

And Scudder will go into this, but how the networks may expand job access and other types of opportunities.

And then also in the near term, and so these would be, these measures would be evaluated over the next five to 10 years as the vision is implemented.

and then long-term to be evaluated 10 years plus as the vision matures towards realization.

And at this point, we would like to take this opportunity to discuss what we've presented both at the memo and here in this presentation.

Do want to just kind of keep it general, you know, what did you like?

What did you not like?

What's missing?

And then also, any detailed comments can be passed along to the study team for consideration as we finalize the vision plan.

So with that,

That's fine if you don't mind taking it up and down.

I will just ask a clarifying question for those people that might not have had a chance to look at the presentation.

It was in our packet.

Would you go over the communities, the counties?

We, so what were the counties?

And Savannah.

Thank you.

Don't want to leave anybody out.

So I guess, Bea, I think had a question about maybe, I think you referenced the Charlottesville area.

Bea, did you have a question?

Yes, I was concerned that it just said the Charlottesville area, not even mentioning Albemarle, let alone the other

let alone the other areas.

Yeah, so I think I guess the official title of our vision plan is the Regional Transit Vision for the Charlottesville area.

Well, if anybody has any suggestions.

on how to capture that.

I haven't really read the vision memo, so if my comment is out of place, I apologize.

Looking at the goals of the plan,

I've always been fascinated by the Center for Neighborhood Technology's index of affordability of a community, which looks at the cost of transportation and housing.

And depending on where you are in that percentage indicates whether you're an efficient community or not.

Given all the issues about affordable housing in the immediate area,

and the ability of workers to maybe even live here.

It seems to me the goal should embrace some sort of idea about driving down the person's cost of living in the community.

Transit can play an important role in helping people afford housing or just afford to live at all.

A number of people in our community have to decide whether to pay the rent or put food on the table.

In transit, I think, can play a role in reducing that conundrum.

I didn't see any statements to that effect.

I saw job access as an important issue, and that is important.

But the goal of maybe being able to drive down some of this cost that people have to bear

Kind of a social aim.

Maybe a worthy goal.

I think that's an excellent comment and I think exactly what we're looking for.

Well, and this is a draft, right?

Yes, so this can be changed.

I mean this is the first draft or the you know the rollout of one of the first.

graphs that we've seen.

Any other comments?

Pat had a good one.

Good question from me.

Anybody else?

There's a comment in the chat from Kendall asking about UTS giving feedback.

No, yeah, we're still working on it.

And what I asked is if the appropriate channel is just through the normal public feedback process.

But then Lucinda also offered her help and support, so much appreciated.

Absolutely.

Well, you could probably share them directly with the consultants, too.

That works as well.

Right, I was gonna say, Kendall, we had a good follow up meeting with Becca the other day and our team and PDC staff are happy to do a follow up anytime.

All right, not seeing any other questions unless I'm missing one.

Okay, and like I said, any comments that are still being worked on as people work through that document, please feel free to pass them on to the study team through Lucinda and we'll incorporate those as we finalize the vision plan.

Sure thing.

Hey, I'm going to start sharing from my screen so I can control the presentation.

Everyone see my screen?

Good.

So thanks, Tim.

It's a pleasure to speak with you all again from RTP and present to you these draft vision concepts.

too, that are here as a tool to help you and the community as we get ready to engage in a second round of community conversation to see what a transit expansion might achieve in terms of improvement in mobility and access to opportunity and a lot of other of these important goals that we've identified as priorities for this transit vision.

and we've developed two vision concepts that we draft vision concepts that we want to use to help you all understand what might be possible.

The constrained vision concept is designed to a budget of what a regional funding source similar to what the Central Virginia Transportation Authority has in the Richmond area.

could produce in terms of funding for transit for this region.

So basically, if you applied a similar funding structure there,

to your region, how many dollars could that produce?

And if you put most of those dollars toward transit, what could it produce?

Which is about $26 million a year.

And if you use that as your primary source of transit funding for most service in your region, meaning that the current local general funds that you put towards transit would no longer have to be put towards transit, or most of it would no longer have to be put towards transit, what could that achieve?

And

The total budget in current dollars of this network is about $35 million in current dollars.

And to put that in context, your current total budget for transit services as of 2019 pre-pandemic was about $19.5 million a year.

So, and we get to that 35 million or so from 26 million in regional funding plus nine and a half million in state and federal funding that would continue to be a source going forward.

So that is where we, how we constrained that constrained vision.

The unconstrained vision we're going to show you tonight is what would you do, what would a network of transit services in your region look like if your priority was to design something, not thinking about funding constraints, that is trying to help you meet your land use, economic development, climate, and many other policy goals that you have for your communities.

So there's no defined limit when we were designing a network that collectively with staff and others at the table felt would help you achieve those goals.

And the total estimated annual cost of that network is about $70 million a year to give you some sense of the scale.

Another way of looking at the cost and the relative scale of these networks is in terms of what we call service hours.

Service hours are one service hour is one hour of a bus or an on-demand transit vehicle or some other vehicle going around and moving people.

and service hours tend to relate to cost because most of the cost of transit is the cost of paying people to run the service and drivers, supervisors, mechanics, et cetera.

And so these bar charts are here to give you a sense of the constrained networks, how many additional service hours are there for CAT and Jaunt and in total.

And so today you have about 94,000 service hours run by CAT, about 37

for a total of 131,000 across the two systems.

In general public, we're not talking about your ADA service.

And then we're talking about that would be 125% increase in total service in the constrained and about a 420% increase in the unconstrained.

So that's a very significant increase in transit service.

And the reason I point this out in terms of service hours is service hours are a good metric for just the overall quantity of what's available to people because the quantity of service makes an enormous difference.

You can't ride a bus that doesn't exist.

And so quantity of service is a good measure if you have substantial service.

I want to start by going through actually some of the outcomes from these networks, in particular two significant ways that we can measure how these networks achieve outcomes that may be important to people.

The first one I want to go through is

How many people are served, and how many jobs are served, and what's the change that tells us a lot about how we're achieving a coverage or proximity to service goal.

And are we providing, are we expanding some of that lifeline access.

And second measure is increases in access to jobs and opportunity, which tells us a lot about the usefulness of service and whether transit might succeed on ridership terms.

And the more people who ride transit, that aligns with a whole lot of goals that people may have, like more useful transit that encourages people to ride, encourages people to get out of cars, which goes along with a lot of the environmental benefits of transit.

and congestion reduction and congestion management benefits of transit and the ability to support dense and walkable redevelopment.

A lot of that comes from primarily the usefulness of transit service.

And these sorts of things are particularly relevant in the urbanized part of the region where you don't have much road space.

It's very hard to widen roads and you have congestion and things that are causing challenges in terms of economic development.

and you have more opportunity obviously for significant walkable development and redevelopment.

So all of this is summarized in the draft report we have, which I believe you were sent a copy of.

So I'm going to go through these at a high level and encourage you to dig into the details in the report.

And in there, we have these same bar charts that tell you what percent of people in the MPO area in this particular chart.

So if you're thinking about basically the developed urbanized area of Charlottesville and Albemarle is the MPO area.

What percent of people are covered by some kind of service?

And these bars are color coded by what percent of people are near service.

That's every 10 minutes or better in dark red, every 15 minutes or better in light red, every 20 minutes or better in purple.

every 30 minutes or better in dark blue, every 60 minutes or better in light blue, and then an on-demand transit zone in yellow.

And then the remaining population, because of the way you have your services with Jaunt, where anyone in the rural areas can get a ride with a day-ahead reservation,

You know, anyone who's not covered is effectively covered in some way, but just by a less useful service that you have to call a day ahead for.

And so that's what the gray bar represents.

And when we look at this for all of the residents today in MPO, what this bar chart is telling us is that 60% of residents have access to some kind of

Same day service, about 50% have access to or are near fixed route transit, but relatively few are near frequent useful transit service.

So only 8% are near 10 minute or better service and only another 6% are near 15 minute or better service.

So that's only 12% who are near the kind of service you can just rely on and not have to think that much about the schedule.

And we can do this kind of measurement for jobs.

So we've got about 65% of jobs are near service that comes sometime fixed route service.

We're showing the on-demand here because of the planned on-demand microtransit zones that you all have planned.

And so this is all of our comparisons are to the baseline of service that CAP is planning with its revised network and these new microtransit zones that you're planning to implement soon.

For everybody to remember that we have a pilot on demand starting, I guess, late summer, early fall.

I'm not sure exactly the timing.

And that's to run for a year.

Basically, to see how it works and what's successful and what needs to be tweaked.

All right, thank you.

No important clarification.

So yeah, so that's why you see that 11% demand set.

And so we can also assess these values for a range of other people, low income residents,

households without cars, young residents, i.e.

people under 18, seniors and residents of color.

And so when you look at the existing patterns of this, you see low income residents and households without cars tend to be closer to more frequent service because they tend to be more concentrated in the core of the region and the denser

Young residents and senior residents tend to be farther from service, in part because they tend to be dispersed more in the suburban and outer parts of the urbanized area.

And residents of color tend to be more concentrated and so are closer to existing services.

Now when we compare what's possible with the constrained network,

The constrained network doesn't move the needle dramatically on the percent of people who are near some kind of fixed service, but it does start to turn up the numbers and percentage of people near more frequent services.

So you see these numbers near every 10 minutes or every 15 minutes service start to go up and you see the number of residents near at least 20 minutes service or better, almost at 30%.

And with jobs, you see a similar increase in the number of jobs that are near every 15-minute service or every 20-minute service or 30-minute or better services.

and similar patterns with low-income residents and households without cars in particular because the constrained network, as we'll show you, is mostly about investing in improvement of the existing services that you've got, not a dramatic expansion of the network over large parts of new areas.

And when we compare to the unconstrained network, the unconstrained network, we're investing a whole lot more so we can do a whole lot more.

And you can see in the unconstrained network, we have a really big increase.

We move the needle in terms of adding more people covered by service in general, and we move the needle dramatically in the percentage of people who are near frequent and useful services because we're investing so much more.

So we now have 28% of residents who are near service that comes every 10 minutes or better, which is a huge improvement.

56% of jobs are near service that comes every 10 minutes or better, which is an enormous improvement from today.

And similar large increases in households without cars, low income residents and residents of color, near frequent services in particular, and also some improvement in all of these groups and how many have access to some kind of service at all.

Yes.

Yeah.

Now, just to touch again on some of these differences in the types of

non fixed route services.

I want to make sure we're clear because in the constrained and unconstrained networks, there are some nuances in the kind of non fixed route services.

Today, Jaunt runs a variety or a number of demand response service across a lot of your more rural areas.

That is what we would call a demand response service, which is you need to book a day in advance.

which doesn't allow much spontaneity and is not necessarily easy for a lot of people to use.

And as I'll mention in a minute, it also has pretty limited hours of service in a lot of places.

The microtransits on-demand services that you're planning to implement this fall are somewhat more useful because they allow people to make a reservation, to call up and get a ride same day and perhaps within a half an hour or better.

And so we call that on demand transit as opposed to demand responsive service.

There's another thing that you all probably are experienced with, which is hearing about ADA paratransit, which is required to be provided with near fixed route service for anyone who, because of a disability, cannot actually reach or walk to or roll to a fixed route stop.

Our focus is not so much on that paratransit service.

Paratransit would need to be provided near any new fixed route services.

But in these networks, we do have some more, some new on-demand transit zones around the region that would significantly improve access to service over and above the usefulness of the same day responsive services that you have today.

Hey, sorry to interject.

Just I wanted to clarify something so that there's not a miscommunication with a bunch of folks on the meeting.

The microtransit grant application is in with the state right now.

CAD is still waiting to hear on whether it will be awarded.

This will not be live and

happening if awarded until a year from now.

So it's not this fall.

It's based on the funding, acquisition of vehicles, development of the program.

Certainly Garland can give you a better ETA on a date, but I didn't want there to be a miscommunication around the timing of that.

It is at least probably a year from now before we'll see that service actually on the ground.

So Trevor, that's a great correction and I may have led some people down the wrong path.

Thank you.

Yeah, and that makes sense.

So my mistake, but thank you for correcting it.

So then when I say baseline, then think of it as with those pilot zones implemented next year and the revisions to the routes that CAD is going to implement soon, the network you will have next year is the baseline, in effect.

It's not precisely what's on the ground today, but it's the network you will have next year as the baseline of comparison.

So when we look at your existing circulator services, which are those demand responsive services that operate on a day ahead reservation system across many of the rural areas of the region, one of the big limiting factors for the usefulness of those services is they have pretty limited hours of service in many communities.

In Albemarle County, it's only 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

In Livingston, it's only two days a week.

In Fluvanna, three days a week.

Louisa has the most useful in terms of having five days a week and almost 12 hours a day of service.

The constrained plan or the constrained vision does envision expanding all of these to be seven day a week services.

It would still be day ahead reservation, but seven day a week services with 13 hours a day of service.

So in most jurisdictions or more to provide a wider range of options for people across most of the week and most of the day.

The constrained vision also looks at improving the connect services, which are the express services connecting from rural towns and communities across the region into Charlottesville.

So this is just a quick review of the number of trips per day that happen on a number of these existing services like the Crozet services, the 29 North, the Lovingston services.

Many of them are very limited to just

Two trips a day, one in each direction.

The constrained vision includes additional trips per day to make it easier for people to travel when they need to, or closer to when they may need to, and includes connect services to Palmyra and Louisa, which do not have connect services today.

So those are some elements of the constrained vision that improve access and connections across more of the rural and smaller towns in the region.

And then in the unconstrained vision, we expand on that even more.

And we include all day fixed route services meeting, you know, continuous every hour to Scottsville, Crozet, Lovingston, Palmyra, Louisa, and Ruckersville seven days a week.

And as well as some on-demand transit zones in some of these smaller towns across the region, like Earliesville, Keswick, Crozet, Lake Monticello, Esmont and Scottsville.

And so when we look at these same proximity measures charts, they don't look as compelling for the rural areas, but they do show us some improvements when we compare existing conditions to the unconstrained vision.

So these are jobs and residents covered by something today in Greene County, which is basically just 24 hour reservation service and then

In the unconstrained vision with an all-day 60-minute service going to Rutgersville, you would have at least 6% of the population of the jobs of the county touched by an all-day service.

For Louisa, you see with the, again, today there's not a fixed route of any kind.

There's no on demand.

There's just 24 hour reservation.

And in the unconstrained, you see the bluish bar showing 7% of jobs and the small percentage of residents having access to all day service.

And then 8% of residents and 26% of jobs having access to an on demand same day service.

Fluvanna County, you see the significant improvement in the percentage of people having access to something better than day ahead.

Reservations here, 37% of population and 25% of jobs in on-demand and 19% of jobs in a small percentage of residents access to 60-minute all-day service.

Nelson County, it's a bit of a smaller slice here, 5% of jobs and just a couple of percent of residents near all-day 60-minute service.

So that's how the proximity measures and outcomes measure up when we look at how these draft networks might improve

Service across the region.

So I want to pause here since we have a lot of material that we're going through and just see if there are any questions about these proximity measures, what these mean, what these look like.

And see if we have questions.

Yeah.

Why don't you go back to the, if you don't mind bouncing back and forth, I'm sorry.

So we can see people and see who might have a question.

Do you mind?

I apologize.

I think there were some comments or questions in the chat.

I see Steven was saying, can we get an estimate of the total annual expenditure in our service area on private automobile travel?

I think that could help put the $70 million of the unconstrained planning context.

We might be able to, Steven, I'm not sure.

We'd have to look into that.

I'm sure AAA has something.

Kendall is asking, what's the expectation for average waiting times for on-demand offerings?

Now, 40 is starting to get up there.

Yes.

So the numbers that we're showing about people and jobs served by transit, we are

taking the existing network or the baseline network we're talking about, or these constrained and unconstrained networks, and then assessing the census data from what's called the American Community Survey Estimates 2019.

So that's pre-pandemic for people and jobs.

I'm double checking on that.

I definitely remember them being much wider in the past, but it is possible that with COVID we reduced those hours.

We also just got a brand new website.

So it's also possible that there was just something lost in translation, but those are the hours on our website.

Okay.

And that's where I pulled them from.

And if you have hours that you would normally run that are better than that, that's what we would want to count as the baseline for comparison.

Gotcha.

So I just got an update.

10 to 2 is correct for our county wide service, but we do have a lot of other services that are focused on Crozet and Keswick and Esmont, and some of those operate outside the 10 to 2 window.

Right, right.

There's a bit of nuance here.

I'm glossing over a bit because you all at Jaunt are running a number of specialized services that it's hard to detail.

every one of them in our conversation.

So any other questions?

Yeah, this is a little bit nerdy of me to say this, but it seems to me travel time is a bigger determination of getting people to ride transit than frequency.

and a lot of emphasis has been placed on increasing fixed route service.

I'm not sure if that's really effective in an area like Charlottesville.

For example, if it takes you an hour to get from downtown to Pantops, it really doesn't matter if the bus comes by every five minutes or 10 minutes, it still takes an hour when you can get in the car and get there in 20 minutes.

So if you're trying to attract people out of their cars to transit, it seems the emphasis ought to be on reducing travel time as opposed to increasing frequency.

Maybe your plan has that in there.

Well, frequency makes a big difference in travel time because frequency makes an enormous difference in your potential weight for getting where you're going.

In-vehicle travel time can make a significant difference, but we find in most communities of this size, the thing that tends to hold back ridership is the wait time because trip distance are relatively short.

I mean, pentops to downtown is not an incredibly long

And even at service every 30 minutes, if you just miss your bus, then you're adding 30 minutes to whatever the travel time might be to get there.

We do talk about, and when I get into talking a little more about the network, some possibilities for some of the longer distances like the 29 corridor, implementing BRT-like improvements to increase vehicle speeds and reduce your

reduce your travel time in vehicle.

And that's in the unconstrained plan, we do have a recommendation for a BRT service on the 29 corridor as part of helping to address some of that because there is, and you just have, that's one of the quarters where you have a lot of congestion that a BRT could do a lot to help you get around.

A lot of the other parts of the community, like getting from Pan Tops to downtown, it would be hard to improve your in-vehicle travel time dramatically without making enormous changes to streetscapes and widening streetscapes to add dedicated lanes and making stop spacing much, much wider.

And that starts to get detrimental relative to the walk access to transit.

Yeah, I've actually modeled stuff like this before in places very much like Charlottesville, Chapel Hill being one of them.

And when we modeled it, we would have like five minute headways and it wouldn't move the needle

on demand very much, because the travel times just didn't get dramatically improved.

And I suspect the demographics and the traffic patterns here are very similar to Chapel Hill.

So I just, I think it needs to be some thought about, I heard what you said about wait time, but I think,

I don't think the holy grail is frequency.

I think frequency plus travel time improvements has got to be part of the mix.

But that's, that's a detail that probably gets worked out later, but I was just kind of curious your perspective on that.

Garland?

Yeah.

There we go.

It's more of, so I'm gonna go back to my experiences at GRTC when Jared Walker helped redesign the network there.

The majority of the emphasis was actually put on frequency and our ridership jumped 22% year over year.

Because this is an iterative process, you can't expect to just put this network in and let it

you know, be forever.

The first goal was based on the direction from the city there and the counties there was they wanted the frequent service.

Then the second piece was to look at once the frequent service is in, how can you read it, adjust networks to reduce travel times.

So I believe that the kind of approach that we are taking here, if that's the same model, that we will look at the frequency first,

get people on the vehicles and then the second piece as a one-two punch is to adjust the schedules, adjust the routes as people become more, as the frequency model clicks in and people get adjusted to seeing a bus come very frequently, then we make adjustments to the schedules and the routing to reduce the travel times.

So it's a one-two, it's never gonna, it's almost impossible to do everything at one time.

and you will see no matter how well we design the network, people are going to use the system differently than what we envision.

We saw that in Richmond.

We thought that we're going to do everything was going to funnel to one place and people started going around the different models.

Yeah, and I want to argue with my friend Garland, but there is a positive correlation between service frequency and ridership.

But if the goal is to get people out of their cars and reduce congestion, I think travel time needs to be really a major factor there.

I've been modeling this stuff for a long time.

all over the country, actually.

So there's two pieces to it.

In Kansas City, when they implemented BRT, they did see an increase in ridership.

That's because they increased service.

So there's always that mark.

But the goal here

I think is to get people out of their cars.

Very interesting though.

And I will say for Lloyd that I was reading in the paper, you all are trying to figure out how to slow down traffic on 5th street.

You could put a BRT lane in and that would help.

Just saying.

I'm not even sure Lloyd's there.

I do want to say that, you know, certainly getting people out of their cars and onto transit is one of our goals, but also, I don't want to overlook the benefits that existing transit users would be getting with the frequency improvements as well.

So,

The other thing to remember, of course, is as a transit vision plan for improving and expanding your network, it is also something that should fit into your

jurisdictions in your regional thinking on land use that can help affect development patterns over time.

That you don't just get people out of cars by getting them to ditch their car from where they live now.

You encourage them to ditch their car by encouraging them to live somewhere where transit is a better option.

So as part of a long term plan, that's also a piece of this puzzle.

I think we are I don't see any more.

I think last time we talked, one of the things I mentioned and went through with you all is thinking about what transit can achieve in terms of expanding people's access to opportunity and places.

And so this little diagram of Jane in a place, and these are all the destinations that she might be able to get to in the city that she lives.

And this is the bubble she can reach in 45 minutes.

Thank you about travel time.

Where can she get in 45 minutes?

And that the stuff that's in that 45 minute bubble is kind of is a good representation of her access to opportunity and access to shopping, access to all sorts of destinations she might want to get to.

And the things that are outside that bubble are things that are probably jobs she can't hold or probably school.

She's very unlikely to go to because they're just too hard to get to.

And so we have assessed how these concepts change access to opportunity for different parts of the urbanized area, because it's in the urbanized area in particular where this change in access is most significant and has the most potential to move the needle on improving people's access to opportunity, on making an impact on whether people might switch to transit from other modes and so on.

And so from First Street in Langford in the southern part of Charlottesville, this is an example of that kind of bubble of what can you get to in that baseline network.

Twenty nine thousand six hundred jobs and thirty one thousand seven hundred residents reachable in forty five minutes.

In the constrained vision network,

We can increase those values from this place by 34% in terms of the jobs reachable and 50% in terms of the residents reachable.

And both of these are very useful measures.

Obviously, if you live there, that is 34% more jobs you could reach, 34% more jobs you could hold easily, 34% more opportunities generally you can reach because these jobs represent

Medical services, they represent shopping destinations you might want to go to, all sorts of things.

If you happen to have a business near here, that's 50% more people who could be customers of your business or workers or any number of things that represent the usefulness.

And in the unconstrained vision, you see we can drastically improve these numbers 122% more jobs reachable and 140% more residents reachable.

So a vast increase in access to opportunity from this particular location.

And we can

basically do this for lots and lots of different places all across the urbanized area in Charlottesville and Albemarle and give you this heat map then of how many more jobs could you reach from different locations.

And so you see in these darker shades of green that you could reach 10,000 jobs or 25,000 more jobs than you can today, or you could in the baseline network under the constrained vision network.

I apologize.

is the constraint network.

I want to make sure I get that right.

So the improvements in service make a big difference across most of the relatively developed areas in Charlottesville and Albemarle.

And then the unconstrained network makes a really big difference across an even larger area.

And you see really large increases in jobs reachable all across the denser parts of the region and even out into some of the slightly less dense areas like Crozet,

and all the way up by the airport in Hollymede, even big increases from there.

And we can summarize then, for all of the people in that MPO area, the kind of urbanized part of the region, how many more jobs and opportunities could you reach in the constrained vision?

You could reach 12% more jobs.

The average person at noon on a weekday could reach 12% more jobs in the constrained vision and in the unconstrained vision could reach 57% more jobs in an hour of travel time.

So that makes

transit vastly more useful to a whole range of people, particularly in Charlottesville and Albemarle for all sorts of daily needs and access to jobs and opportunities across the region.

So Paul, I just want to pause for a moment and see if there are questions about that part of the outcomes and how we get to those assessments of outcomes.

So again, anybody have any questions?

You'll have to jump in because I can't tell, don't see any hands up, but I'm trying to scroll through my group here.

Doesn't sound like anybody has a question.

I think they'd jump in if they had one, right?

So let me just give you a tour then of what's in the unconstrained and constrained vision networks.

And again, these are draft networks that are to be out here for public input and review.

So in the existing network, this is a map on the left showing the existing, or excuse me, the baseline network that CAT will be running.

later this fall, is that right Garland?

Of the new slightly revised network of routes.

Color coded by the frequency because that frequency makes such a significant difference in the usefulness of service.

And you see the trolley route in red is the only thing that's every 15 minutes today.

A number of the circulators on campus at UVA are currently running every 20 minutes.

They normally run every 15 minutes.

A lot of other routes in the CAT system, the three, the two, the seven, the five would be every 30 minutes in the baseline.

And then most everything else is every hour, the one, the 11, the nine.

And of course, that's a very long wait for service.

You also see on here a few of the tan color routes, which represent those connect routes coming in from across the region.

And then on the right, we have the regional network.

What are the services around the region, the circulator services, the connect services to Livingston, to Buckingham, and some representations of the various circulator services that exist across the region.

So the constrained network in the rural areas

builds out and expands on a lot of those existing services and expands and improves them with on same day on demand.

You could use an app or call in and get a ride within roughly 30 minutes in these kind of tan colored zones in Esmont, Scottsville, Louisa, Zion Crossroads, Lake Monticello.

Crozet, to provide better on-demand service in some of these smaller towns and communities across the more rural parts of the region, as well as a series of connecting all-day, seven-day-a-week services that would run about once an hour from Lovingston, from Scottsville, from Palmyra, from Louisa, through Zion's Crossroad, from Rutgersville, and from Crozet connecting to Charlottesville.

and you can also see on this map an every 20 minute service that goes all the way up to the airport in Fontaine.

So that's a significant improvement in connectivity across a lot of the region.

In addition to, as I mentioned before, these circulator services within each county, the ones you have to call ahead for would be running seven days a week with expanded hours of service.

Within the urbanized area, this map shows you the significant improvement in frequency of service and expansion to a few new places that happens with the fixed route network.

Some key aspects of this include every 10-minute service on a BRT spine running from downtown through the grounds and up the 29 corridor to Fashion Square Mall, then continuing as an every 20-minute service all the way up to the airport,

and the North Fork Research Center.

An every 10-minute service, somewhat similar to today's trolley running from Fontaine through downtown out to Pantops and then branching into 30-minute services in Pantops, covering a number of the more dense areas there.

Every 15-minute service on 5th and on Avon coming into downtown.

An every 15-minute service

On this new Route 16, going through the university and connecting to the Bear Trot Shopping Center.

Another every 10 minute service through the grounds and into downtown.

and then most of the other services in the city being improved to every 30 minutes.

So the Scottsdale Road Monticello corridor every 30 minutes, the current route four path would be every 30 minutes and

all of these other routes every 30 minutes.

So a vast improvement there.

And every 30 minutes on Ivy Road, going out towards Crozet, continuing to the UVA Northridge Center and then continuing every 60 minutes all day to Crozet.

So this is just giving you kind of the breakdown of a lot of those things I walked through.

One of the key things, of course, being now you've got a number of high-frequency corridors across a lot of the pretty dense parts of the city, making it much easier to access a lot of destinations across the city very quickly.

You still would have the on-demand transit zones in Pantops and the farther north 29 area

to help Holly Mead, for example, connect to that Route 7 corridor.

And then the bus rapid transit on 29 would be an important investment in speed and reliability of service on that really important corridor.

For those of you who aren't familiar with bus rapid transit, what we mean by that is a series of improvements that often include dedicated lanes,

Doesn't have to be dedicated lanes for the entire length of the corridor, but particularly in the more congested segments.

So if you've been to Richmond and you've seen the Pulse BRT on Broad Street, it's got dedicated lanes for about half of its corridor on Broad Street, for example.

The other portions of the corridor runs in mixed traffic.

In some communities, they use a series of what's called queue jump lanes, meaning a special lane at traffic signals that the bus can pull into to get around the queue or the backup of traffic and then get out ahead of traffic with a special signal.

Signal priority, meaning the bus is communicating with the signals to say, I'm coming, hold the green light so that the bus can move along faster and stay on schedule.

and often improved and significantly branded stops that are often more widely spaced so that the bus can go faster over longer distances.

So stops every half a mile often as opposed to every quarter mile or less.

and often including higher curb levels or in some cases what we call platform height boarding, meaning the curb is all the way up at the level of the bus door and then you can easily roll on and off.

So the Pulse in Richmond, GRTC Pulse is an excellent example of these kinds of BRT improvements.

Metro Way, if you've been up here in Alexandria and Arlington, between Pentagon City, Crystal City, and Potomac Yard, Ride On,

Flash service in Montgomery County is another example, as well as the CTFast Track in Connecticut.

Many communities have implemented versions of these with different levels of corridor investments to improve speed, reliability and consistency and branding of service.

And to be clear, the bus rapid transit would have wider spaced stops in order to help the bus move faster because there is this speed versus access trade off of somewhat longer spacing, which means sometimes slightly longer walks.

But that's often made up for because the service frequency is very high and the speed of service is much better.

And so when we look at kind of the range of different types of stopping patterns, you'd have the the longer distance.

Services to Livingston to to Rutgersville and others would have more express bus type stopping patterns where you have a couple of stops in some of these rural towns and then a long distance between stops and then another couple of stops maybe in a town and then a long distance between stops.

The BRT would have stops probably about every half a mile on average.

And then your local services are more like every quarter mile.

And of course, if we talked already a little bit about on demand to demand response and their stopping patterns.

One last note about coordination with UVA.

We've had some coordination with UVA throughout this process.

We will continue to do so.

The unconstrained vision does imagine a future where the regional investment in service is so great between this improved BRT service that goes through the grounds, the improved frequency on the trolley, which is called Route 1,

in that network and the improved Route 16, that there is a useful potential reallocation of UTS circulator resources to do some slightly different things, because these other regionally oriented things that are carrying people potentially within campus and well beyond can do a lot of things that some of the circulator services are doing today.

There is an ongoing UVA master plan.

We've talked with staff about what they've been thinking about and the outcome of that may change exactly what would happen within the grounds.

But we still think there's a lot of opportunity in this kind of vision of an unconstrained future with a drastic increase in service that you could

look at reorientation of some of the circulator services on campus.

Again, let me, I don't see me run through here.

Speak up if you have a question.

I'm looking to see if I see any hands.

It looked like Steven, did you have a question again about

Clarify for the group the service that necessitates an ADA zone and the types of services that do not.

Steven.

Yeah.

In the chat.

Good question, Steven.

Yes.

So anytime you are operating a, an all day fixed route service,

that kind of service does mean you, that does come along with the obligation to run ADA paratransit service within three quarters of a mile of the stops for those services.

So running fixed route all day services in these rural areas would start to bring a new kind of obligation

to some of those communities and some of those areas to run ADA complimentary paratransit service.

And any extension of CATS fixed route service into new areas would bring that obligation to those areas.

So some of the expansion of fixed route service into Pantops and further up 29 would likely be CAT operated services and would bring that paratransit obligation with it.

Let's see, Steven says, how long do we have to not operate the rural routes for, I just lost my, how long do we have to not operate the rural routes for

It's a good question, Steven.

I'd have to go back and look at the regulations and some of the examples to give you an answer.

And I have to leave it at that.

Okay, any other questions?

Jump in here, or we'll move on.

Scudder, I'm just looking at my time.

It's almost at 30.

I understand.

Yeah, I am almost done with my part.

And then we have just a little bit to talk about.

I think Tim's going to talk about our phase of engagement.

Diane, this is Hal.

Can I ask a quick question?

Sure.

You said the ADA company prayer transit comes in for anybody who lives with three quarters of a mile of a stop.

I thought it was three quarters of a mile of the route.

It's just a stop.

I believe it's just the stop.

The minimum requirement from the regulation, I believe, is the stop.

Now, agencies have...

It's the whole route?

Yes.

Okay.

All right.

Richard, that's the case.

Yeah, it's the whole route.

No, I mean, I think I've made it because what you're trying to do

If a person can't get to the fixed route somehow, you're trying to equalize it by the agenda.

All right.

Somebody needs to mute themselves.

Excuse me.

Please mute yourselves.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Ted.

No, I think I'm okay.

I mean, it's just the whole route.

I've, I've delved ADA since 1991.

So I think it's pretty, uh,

I see Lloyd had a question in the chat about is the 70 million for unconstrained system just operating or is that is the capital cost, and how many new vehicles, we can get you a vehicle count.

I don't have that off the top of my head.

We have estimated the capital

We have estimated the capital cost of the full fleet over a 12-year period in that number, assuming federal funding is taking 80% of that as well.

Okay, I think we're good.

Yeah, I just wanted to talk through the constrained network really quick.

The constrained network is mostly investing in modest improvements in frequency and modest expansion.

So in this network, there is improved frequency on Avon.

There is improved frequency on High Street with a change in the trolley and expansion a little bit into Pantops and an improvement on Route 7 to every 20 minutes.

There's not big changes in the network in the rural areas in terms of new routes or all day routes.

But as I talked about before, there is investment in the expansion of hours of service for the rural day ahead reservation services.

So it's constrained to fit within that estimated budget of what similar tax levels of the Central Virginia Transportation Authority with most of those dollars going to transit.

And as I mentioned before, there's improvement in the connect services and the number of trips per day provided there.

The seven days a week of the circulator services and the other link services would be assumed to operate basically as they do today in that constrained vision.

improvements in the seven to every 20 minutes, improvements in the service to the two with Avon get every 15 minutes and Route 4 to operate every 30 minutes and select trips of the seven going up to North Fork Research Park and the airport.

And a really important piece of this is also the assumption that the investment in service is also going to provide consistent seven day a week service.

So this is a chart, a frequency chart showing how frequently a route is running across the day on weekdays.

So like Route 1 that goes to the community college in Riverside is hourly from 6 a.m. until about 10 p.m. And also on Saturdays until 9 p.m. And it does not run on Sundays.

That's what this chart is telling us.

And that's your existing baseline today.

The constrained network improves the frequencies of those services on weekdays and also provides more consistent service into the evening and all seven days a week so that the services in the urbanized area would run seven days a week.

which is a really big improvement because evening and weekend service is really critical for hospital workers, retail workers, service workers.

And if you're not there for them on Sunday, you might as well not be for them at all.

And improved span is a critical aspect of improving access to opportunity and ridership over the long term.

So that's a summary of the concepts.

I think there's a one hand up from Michael Barnes.

Yeah.

Let me just say, we'll scroll through.

Thank you, Scott.

Yeah.

First of all, wonderful presentation.

The graphics that were in this presentation today, I found very illuminating and helped, you know, provide a lot more information.

Some of the stuff I cleaned out reading the report earlier today.

So, you know, I encourage you to add some of those in there and some of that discussion.

I think it would be very helpful to the reader.

Second of all, back to some of the, there was a comment made earlier on about the transit goals of the study, the study's transit goals, affordable housing was mentioned, and I guess that's implied in some of the things that we're talking about, but it does seem to have a real practical aspect, and probably addresses a major concern in the community, and maybe that should be brought to the fore a little bit more, and I think that really dovetails into my last comment, which is about

It's interesting to see your regional network.

I know I sort of briefly mentioned this back when you all, when I first sort of started this new position with VDOT and came in late to the study, but that's really the jobs and the housing, the affordable housing that exists over in the valley.

And it's really interesting to look at the routes that you're talking about here.

And like Waynesboro is a lot closer than a lot of these other localities we're talking about.

And that's partly a reflection of

the MPO, or excuse me, the planning district's boundaries.

I mean, I think it's a good idea to add Buckingham County in here, but to sort of exclude Waynesboro, I just think about all the traffic and congestion, whether it's on Fifth Street, as Diana alluded to earlier, or we see on 64 during the peak periods, and transit is supposed to sort of help those types of things.

And that's a huge market over there, both for

people who are living there for affordable housing and work in our community or who are driving and creating congestion in our community.

That may be beyond the scope of this study, but I think it bears being mentioned at some point that if it doesn't include it in this step, maybe in the next step, there is a real need to

Look at a major traffic driver that's coming in from just 20 miles away and also represents a huge place where a lot of people are going to seek affordable housing.

So I'll just leave it with that.

I did more comments than it is really questions.

Michael, introduce yourself.

Are you from VDOT?

I'm sorry, Diane.

My name is Michael Barnes.

I was working for the past three years with VDOT's local assistance program, helping

You spend your money for BDOT and federal grants and now I'm working with Chuck Proctor doing planning for the region and we'll be working more extensively with you all on some of your planning issues.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just with a record was trying to figure out because it sounded like you were with VDOT, but I couldn't quite.

And of course, I'm not seeing your face.

So I and anyway, but that's great.

Thank you for introducing yourself.

I appreciate it.

Good point.

Yes, absolutely.

All right.

Are there any other questions?

Let me scroll through here and see if I see any more hands.

Is there in the chat?

Okay.

Oh, he answered about the money.

Yeah.

And then I see we've got a comment about a couple of things here on workforce.

You can probably take your screen down now if that was the, I think that was the end of your presentation.

Good.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's just two slides here and we, I know we're short on time, so I'll

I'll just touch on those.

On the next slide, we're just showing where we are in terms of the public and stakeholder engagement process.

Our phase one report is on the project website.

You can go on there and find summary and findings from the first public meeting, stakeholder meeting, the survey.

We had two surveys that went out, actually.

One was a map-based survey.

The other was Survey Monkey.

And we are really right into the phase two engagement.

That's when we are vetting and envisioning this month, May 2022.

We've been very busy actually pulling together the next survey.

And Scudder and his team have drafted a survey that will go live on June 9th that presents basically what you've seen here tonight and allows

the public and stakeholders to provide feedback on those two alternatives.

We've also been getting ready for the next public meeting, which is on June 23rd.

And so we have a save the date drafted that's ready to go out.

We have a registration page and getting everything ready for that.

And also working with the TJPDC staff on

getting together focus groups that would meet in June.

There's some different groups there.

We're trying to get in touch with neighborhood leaders.

We're trying to get in touch with transit riders.

And we're also trying to get in touch with service providers who's who's I guess the people they help are ones that that might rely more on transit, might be more transit dependent.

So we're

We're really trying to reach out in that regard.

I know the PDC staff also is looking to set up at the transit center and engage with riders as well to try to get some interaction that way as well.

I know that we heard feedback of trying to reach more people in that last phase.

And so we've made some changes here in phase two to try to meet those goals.

And then in July, we're going to have getting more into that third phase of reviewing the draft as we get into August.

And PDC staff is also making presentations to localities.

I know Scudder and team met with Albemarle County staff to prepare for a presentation for their Board of Supervisors.

There will also be a presentation to City Council.

And then the PDC staff is going to be giving updates to the

to the other localities in the region.

So that's something else to look forward to.

All right, I guess the last slide was just giving an idea of what to expect in the survey.

Again, Scott and his team have drafted a survey, sent out that draft to staff to review actually.

And I believe they've reviewed that

Given an affirmative on that initial draft, there's maybe a few tweaks still remaining, but we look forward on getting that out and working with stakeholders to help get that survey out to as many people as we can.

And we look forward to also some one-on-one discussions with stakeholders and other folks in the community to really have good, meaningful engagement and feedback on the visions that they see here.

All right.

So, and I guess if you can take down your screen again, sorry.

So we have a ways to go.

That's correct.

Yeah, yeah, so we don't want people to think this is going to happen tomorrow.

There's a lot of work to do yet.

Any other comments, questions?

Happy to entertain just a few more.

We're actually on time, which is lovely.

Oh, there's somebody in the chat.

Let me just see what this is.

Oh, that couple of people have had to leave already.

So Trevor's gone.

And but anyway.

Well, I guess with that, I would just I would just mention, I think Michael Payne had asked about, you know, how can UVA and UTS contributes to the constrained or constrained

The unconstrained, we've certainly laid out ideas about how a revised regional network and a revised UTS network can work together more seamlessly.

I think there's definitely opportunities to look at that more in the constrained version as well.

And on the financial side,

major institutions, significant businesses, community colleges in a range of communities are usually major participants in helping make regional transit happen from the financial side.

And that is a thing a lot of universities, community colleges, businesses, major institutions do.

Right.

Well, it sounds like a big price tag, but if we want to make transit work in this community, it's not going to happen for free, right?

And that's one of the reasons why we're working on that governance model, because that leads us to

An authority, and an authority gives us the ability to try and figure all of this out and pay for something.

So I mean, I think that's, I see Garland nodding his head as well.

But thank you.

It was a great presentation, very informative.

Once all the details are up on the website, you'll have an even easier way of reviewing all of the maps and all of that.

That's great.

Ted, I see you're unmuted.

Did you have anything you wanted to say?

I just try to watch who's muted and watch the body language.

All right.

Well, with that, Ben, thank you guys very much.

You are more than welcome to stay for the rest of our meeting.

We're going to have our transit provider updates or you can take off, whatever you'd like to do.

Thank you.

Last week, last week the other providers met here at John or virtually to talk about opportunities for us to cooperate.

We were honored to have Christine Jacobs attend as well.

The big topic was showing some overlays between Cat Roots and Albemarle County public school students to see if there's an opportunity for school students

to take CAT instead of yellow buses, which would help, we hope, on easing some of the driver shortage issues.

I'm not sure where that's gonna go yet, but it was very illuminating and we had some very interesting conversations about that.

On the environmental scene, we are leveraging a work scope by CAT to study alternative fuels for John.

We're looking at whether electric vehicles or some other

A fuel system would be appropriate for jaunt service and I think Cass is doing the same thing for their fleet.

As part of our study, however, we are forming an advisory committee of, we hope, of a cross-section of community to give us feedback as our consultant goes through the process of studying the alternatives and what they might mean.

We're hoping to use that feedback to inform our business decisions about

how we might move forward.

And finally, in a couple of weeks, we have a woman named Joanne Olson from Minneapolis.

She's with SRF Consulting.

They're actually here to look at our parking lot.

However, she's an expert in joint development with transit, and there may be opportunities within the community to

do some mixed-use development, maybe affordable housing, connect that with transit so that we can begin to fashion land use in and around transit and maybe encourage ridership that way.

And she'll be here to talk to some of the providers about her experiences and the direction that Charlottesville might want to consider.

That's great, Ted.

And before, Charmaine, before you give your update, I just want to mention to this group that I am now the liaison on the Advisory Committee for Environmental Sustainability that is a part of Albemarle County Public Schools.

And we had our first meeting, or the first meeting that, it's the second meeting, first meeting I was able to attend.

And they, the discussion was around

This very idea Charmaine and Ted about getting students on to cat buses, public buses.

So we need to follow up a group of us with that particular group.

They are, we're very excited about it.

Right?

Because what we're trying to do is to connect the Albemarle County Public Schools and that county government work around the environment and sustainability.

And that topic came up with one of the subcommittees.

So I'm going to get back to you guys on this one, right?

Could be very interesting.

Absolutely.

All right, so as Ted said, we did, we found some opportunities where we could possibly help each other.

So I am having conversations now with my supervisor, Superintendent, to look at how we would roll this out.

And of course, we would have to get our community ready for this.

And parents and the administrators, and because this is just a different approach,

and which we have taken.

And this is part of the recruitment that we're looking at.

It's no one set approach that we will take.

It's going to probably be a number of things that we're doing that's going to help us to address this driver shortage.

We have had several job fairs and what we call pop-ups.

That means we're going out to the community and meeting the people

And we're seeing some work from it.

We're seeing some fruit of the labor.

We've got about 17 people in the trenches.

So we've got to continue doing that.

Along with the retention, along with the recruitment, I'm also looking at retention.

What am I doing within to help people, want people, get people to stay at work.

And I'm doing some leadership training with their folks.

I'm using, we're doing a book study

but John Maxwell on the five levels of leadership.

And we're kind of unpacking that, looking at how we can, looking at the man in the mirror and how can we improve ourselves as leaders.

And so that's the work that's going on internally as we continue to look at recruitment.

And we also, real quick, we have, we're going to purchase, we were able to do two, now we found out we can do four

Type A buses.

And that's an alternative transportation that doesn't require a CDL license.

That means I can take those four buses, perhaps move them to our spare population and then take four drivers who are CDL certified to drive our larger buses.

So that's another approach that we're taking to come at this situation.

I am determined

That we're not going to go into our year coming in the way we're leaving this one.

So we've got to get our children there safely and on time.

Yeah, type A buses.

These buses are 14 passengers or less.

That doesn't require a CDL license.

You do have to be tested.

There's some training associated with it, but nothing like the CDL license.

You don't have to have a CDL license to drive it.

So any one of you can drive it.

It's like a van.

I saw you talking about that I think on TV recently, Charmaine.

And this is really great.

So we do need to get the school system and the folks, because we don't want groups working in silos.

We need to have everybody working together on the same issue.

So that's great.

Very good.

All right.

Of course, Becca's not here, but we have Kendall.

Hey, everyone.

Yeah, the big news for us is our announcement on our purchase of four battery electric buses.

The announcement went out last week.

Hopefully, everyone's had a chance to see that.

Meanwhile, similar to Charmaine, we're really determined to not enter the next school year the way we're leaving this one.

One of the approaches we're taking a look at is that CDL license barrier and how can we sort of attack that in creative ways to sort of alleviate that barrier.

And hopefully we'll have some interesting concepts to report back to this group as the summer kind of progresses.

Great, thank you.

Did anybody have any questions for Garland?

I should have asked Garland, Kendall, or Charmaine about any of their report.

I should have jumped in and asked.

I don't see any.

Okay, and then Garland, go right out.

I guess Garland needs to go now.

So, I'll do transit first.

So, we launched our study in regards to alternative fuel vehicles.

The first meeting was actually Tuesday, May the 10th.

We're off really well.

Albemarle County is as a part of that team and we are designing the effort.

Christine and her team was also invited.

Unfortunately, she wasn't able to make it that day herself, but we are hopefully lining up the effort of getting through the study in time for the grant application process the next site.

That's the goal, to be in a position to take advantage of the no-load grants that are going to be out there and a ton of alternative fuel vehicle money.

And we've also got an effort that will start on the school side, looking at alternative fuel vehicles for the school system, Charlottesville schools.

Effort on that side is it's almost a foregone conclusion that we're going to do something on the EV battery side.

The model tends to work much better.

You have a down period in the middle of the day where you can actually recharge.

We'll work through those because the infrastructure component will dictate how much can be done on whether it's public or pupil.

So that's where we are.

We are also aggressively, like everyone here, trying to

recruit as many drivers, mechanics as we possibly can.

The city has been very good to us in the sense that if there's supposed to be a surplus and based on that surplus, there's additional drivers that will be allocated to CAD to help with our enhanced service model planning.

So that's a very, that's very good news.

Additionally, we were also on the city side, kicked off our efforts to look at and get on board a consultant with Collective Bargaining, which is another piece that is going to make sure that we all pay very close attention to over the next year or so.

So we've also had a very good meeting with schools.

They are very interested in

themselves helping to alleviate the driver shortage because you know CAT does through contract their services.

They're looking at the type A bus model themselves, 14 or less.

I think they're endeavoring to do two at this point in time and then see how the model works and then potentially scale up from there.

But our goal is to continue to grab and, you know, enhance as many positions as we possibly can.

because we don't want to be in the same position that we're in this year with the start of school for next year.

And eventually, hopefully, we'll be able to adjust our pay scale to be in line with our partners so we'll be at least competitive to the individuals around.

And the last thing I have to report is we've had our efforts where there was an issue with one of our senior centers, Crescent Halls,

a particular route that we had.

And we went out yesterday actually had the city manager with us looking at potential enhancements to service over there.

There's nothing in concrete now, but we working through potentially ways of making adjustments.

And hopefully in the next, I say in the next couple of weeks, we should have something concrete to be able to report back.

Okay, now I can ask if anybody has any questions for Garland.

And I will say, of course, one of the benefits of having an authority gets all of our bus drivers on the same pay scale, which would be enormously helpful, I think so.

But we have to work towards that authority.

Lloyd says he's got to run.

So Lloyd, we were glad to have you with us.

And we have one more report.

Neil, somebody's here from BRPT, I feel sure.

Oh, it's Wood.

Not a problem.

I'm representing Neil today.

You don't look like Neil, but OK. We both have gray hair at this point.

Anyway, quickly one update from DRPT just that the FY23 SIP is in draft and available on our website and that should be going to the CTB for their June 21st and 22nd meeting for final approval.

So keep an eye out because after that meeting project should be approved.

There you go.

Try not to use the alphabet soup because sometimes that's true.

That's okay.

That's great.

Thank you.

Any questions for Wood?

Okay.

Well that it is right about six o'clock and there is a spot on our agenda for other business.

I'll look to see if anybody has any other business they want to bring up.

and not seeing anybody jump at the chance, then I'm going to, hearing no objections, I'm going to adjourn us to our next meeting, which will be June the 23rd.

And it will be, I will remind you, in person at Water Street.

And I see Christine nodding her head and she's agreeing.

So we'll remind you in the email with the meeting packet as well, but it'll be fun to see everybody in person.

All right, with that, have a lovely Memorial Day weekend and stay safe.

Thank you.