Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   1/25/2024

Welcome to the Regional Transportation Committee for the first of January.

That's my fault, sorry.

And my understanding is that we don't have any more to, that we need to vote to.

That is correct.

So with that, we have lots of new faces at the table.

Lots of new faces.

And I would like to start, as we always do, with entering up in your questions.

And as we introduce the new folks, if you all would please introduce yourselves to our group.

Ms. McKeel, after you've already used my name, I'm going to turn it back.

We're old friends.

I am Mike Murphy, and I'm the Interim CEO at John.

I have been familiar with the RTP,

Scott?

Hey, everyone.

I'm Scott Sulstorff.

I'm the director of transportation and marketing for UVA.

I think everybody knows Beto Wright, and I've been close to her back in August.

I think it was my second in-person meeting with her, so nice to be back.

Welcome back.

My name is Lucas Ames.

I serve for Jaunt as the urban representative of the city of Charlottesville.

We've been on the RTP for a couple of times now, and I'm excited to be here.

Hi, I'm Tom Morgan.

Hi, I'm Katie Miller.

Welcome in person.

Oh, and I do want to say that, to let people know, Garland let me know earlier this afternoon that he would not fit in just right.

So I think he will be joining us.

He's gonna be with Charlottesville City Council.

I guess this is the start of my third year on this board, and I think we're working with everyone here.

Yep.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Trevor Henry, Deputy County Executive at Walpole County.

I've been supporting RTP

Londrey is a member of the county administrative support since 2019-ish or so.

We're going to just skip to the back.

Ms. Ann Wall is here in attendance.

Ann is our new deputy county executive.

She started in December.

She will be over portfolio includes community development, facilities, and parks and rec.

Comes from North Carolina, 30 years

Anne?

Good afternoon, everyone.

As Trevor said, my name is Anne Waugh, and I serve as Deputy County Executive in Albemarle County.

I recently left Eastern North Carolina, where I worked more than 30 years ago in Eastern North Carolina, and most recently served

about six and a half years as a city manager of Greenville, North Carolina, home to East Carolina University, a community of about 100,000 people, very much like an area very, in some ways, very similar to Alabama County, and in some ways,

Very different than Albemarle County.

In my community, we had a fixed-base bus system.

We worked with East Carolina University, which had a transit system, and our local hospital had a transit system as well.

And our board partner in that equation was the county who provided air transit service.

So I have the opportunity to work with transit services in several different communities.

Delighted to be in Albemarle County and be here today.

Welcome.

Thank you.

We're thrilled to serve you.

Hello, I'm Natalie Ochsren.

It's Ochsren.

I know everyone's probably wondering that.

And I am, like, Mike, new this year to Charlottesville City Council.

And we ran on similar platforms of housing and transit, mobility, accessibility, and bikeability.

Yeah, that's part of it, bikeability.

I live downtown near Meade Park.

So nice for me to get around with my bike as much as possible.

and I will be advocating for that, considering um, transit and development on a human scale, not necessarily using cars as the base unit above you.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Yes.

Peter Thompson.

I'm Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I'm a land use transportation and healthy communities planner.

And the person to contact if you have any questions about the meetings or anything.

Hi everyone, Sarah Pennington.

Alright, I will buy one of these.

We're good?

Alright.

With that, do we have anyone who signed up for matters from the public?

Oh, we have an approved agenda, I'm sorry.

All right.

With that, I will entertain a motion to approve our agenda.

So moved.

Is that the same?

So moved.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

All right.

Approve the draft minutes that actually go back to October the 26th, which we have not approved.

Did anyone have any comments or comments or questions about the minutes?

Alright, I'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes of October 26th.

So moved.

Alright, thank you.

Scott, is there a second?

Second.

I think I heard Brian first.

All those in favor, please say yes.

Yes.

Any abstentions?

Alright.

Then we have all those in favor, please say aye.

I think we've had the majority of people.

Yes.

All right.

Matters from the public now, Sandy.

If any member of the public would like to speak, please let me know.

If you're online, you can raise your hand by looking in the bar at the bottom of your screen and we will

Okay, sounds good.

Then we'll go to the next item on the agenda is appointing a new vice chair.

If you all, of course, some of you remember and some of you may not know, but Morgan Smith was our vice chair.

So we do need someone to serve in that role as vice chair.

were attached, if you all noticed, to the agenda.

And the bylaws say that the chair and vice chair shall be elected from the membership, that is the voting membership or the partnership.

And that with the election of officers takes place at the first meeting after July 1st.

So, Christine, I'm assuming that we will have another election.

You know, when we vote for vice chair today, we will realize both the chair and vice chair again in package office.

The vice chair serves, obviously runs the meetings and serves in the absence of the chair.

and actually for, it's interesting, what I learned just recently that you don't need when you're making nominations for chairs the next year according to several of the attorneys I've talked to.

You don't need a second, and I just learned that.

But I wouldn't have paid if there were any other nominations from the school.

I think we have Natalie nominated

All those in favor, please.

Natalie, are you good?

So all those in favor, please.

Any opposed?

So we have any questions.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

All right, with that,

Lucinda, we have the RTP orientation, and with all the new folks, it's perfect timing for some orientation.

Thank you.

So this is the Regional Transit Partnership, and it started around 2016.

The Planning District Commission reexamined the opportunities for a more regional approach for transit planning.

in 2017.

So they did a study in 2017.

They created the Regional Transit Partnership with a joint MOU, which is on the website.

And then in 2018, the RTP developed a strategic plan, which is also on the website.

Albemarle and Charlottesville funded the MOU in 2019.

And then UVA joined us as a

voting member in 2020.

So I'm just going to go through a couple of our accomplishments.

So and I'm not going to read all of these.

We in the past couple of years, we conducted the Albemarle County expansion feasibility study, which led to MicroCat.

We also secured a grant and did the regional transit vision plan, which kind of

created a transit network for the entire region and a vision of what the community wants.

And this year, we finished the vision plan and we started, based on recommendations from the vision plan, we started the regional transit governance study.

And we just completed that in December.

In our next February meeting, you'll have the last presentation from the consultant.

We also secure funding for a mobility management program to expand transit services for older adults and people with disabilities.

and that's going to kind of help also with the RTP's vision of kind of coordinating transportation and making one place for everybody to get their transit information.

So hopefully as this program grows, we'll be able to have a website where everybody can go and find all the information about the different services.

And I just wanted to go through the

the web pages with you, because I've been working on them, and they have a lot of information and I think sometimes people don't know where to find the information.

So let me see if I can, oh here it is, okay.

It's not sharing, oh great, thank you.

Yeah.

So I'm going to start with our committee web page.

We have two pages.

So the RTP committee web page has the description and some of the core values.

And then down below, there's the meeting schedule.

And if you click on the month or the date that you have your meeting, the agenda is on here.

You can download it as a PDF using that link.

or you can use it like this and then there's links to different documents that you can use to go through the meeting.

And then if you back up to the committee webpage, you can find all of the previous meeting notes here.

So we have the videos, the agenda and the minutes, the written minutes for the past two years.

We have the committee members on here and then some of the documents that I just mentioned that helped lead to the RTP are down here too.

So there are RTP documents and there's a 101 about the Regional Transit Partnership, the strategic plan, and the MOU, the founding study, and the bylaws.

Those are all there if you are interested in them.

And then if you have any questions, you can call me.

Well, you might just let them know.

You sit at a packet before the meeting.

Yeah, so you will get a week before the meeting in your email a packet, which will have the agenda and then the supporting materials.

So you don't have to go to the website to get all of this.

It's however you feel most comfortable doing it.

Thank you.

Oh, right.

And just quickly, Garland, Mike Hurley is the leader of Omaha County.

and Natalie.

Alright.

With that, were there any questions, anyone have comments or schedules, process, anything along those lines?

I don't see any.

We just reviewed Garland, what was the orientation part of the act.

So let me look at it.

I waited too long for pause.

Not only does the chair and vice chair usually switch between city and county, but in order to establish a form, both the member from the city and the county have to be present.

And that is something a little different for this particular group.

So in order to actually have a meeting where we can vote on it, because there's someone from Albemarle

and someone from Charlottesville.

And John.

And John, they are lovely women.

Yeah, that's great.

Did I forget that?

I'm sorry.

We'll go right ahead and do that.

Sure.

So you can get to the transit planning webpage here or from the homepage of the TJPBC website.

So we have a regional transit planning webpage that has a lot of the recent studies.

and so there's a link to the committee webpage and then here's some of the studies that we recently did.

The regional transit governance study we're just wrapping up and that was to look at forming some type of an organization to bring in additional revenue and help with regional planning for transit and then we had the regional transit vision plan which kind of created what we would like to do with the money that we would bring in from the

Governance Study organization.

We also did the Albemarle County Transit Expansion Study, which was the beginning of MicroCat.

And the Regional Transit Coordinating Study is from, I added some of the older, more important plans on here, just for people's reference.

So in 2016, there was the Regional Transit Coordination Study, which is similar to the Governance Study that we just did.

It kind of recommended

that we formed the RTP and continued working towards a transit authority.

Oh wait, sorry, June 2008 was the regional transit authority study and then there was also a regional rail concept study that had proposed doing light rail up and down Route 29.

Thank you for that.

Sure.

Yes, the RTP came about, and Christine can probably add to this too, but

It came about because Albemarle County, to be honest with you, was concerned about not having a voice at the table regarding transit.

And so we reached out to Pat and to Charlottesville and the University of Virginia and said we need a group getting together that can talk about how to improve transit in our area.

and so the partnership was formed and at that, when it was first formed, it was made up of Charlottesville and Albemarle and John.

The University of Virginia, at the very beginning of the partnership, was a non-voting member.

They later joined us as a voting member, which we would feel having decided to join us as a voting member.

It was an effort to have some input from Albemarle in Japan, which was of course a city government department, and to try and improve transit in the urban area, the rural area, and have input from John, Kat, Albemarle County, and all of the players on how to improve transit in our area.

and I know the community at times has thought, what in the world have those people been the part people even been doing or accomplishing?

But when you look at what we've done in the years and the fact that we have a pandemic in the middle of it, which did slow us down a little bit, I think we've come a long ways.

Right now, we're discussing an authority.

What the authority would do

Christine, would you like to add anything else?

Sure, I can say in 2008, there is enabling legislation.

So in 2008, there was an authority established in Virginia code

However, that did not have any mechanism for funding in that legislation.

And so that was the pause that was put on the regional authority is because there was no funding coming in in order to do anything actionable with that existing enabling legislation.

And so that's why, again, in 2000, you know, whatever it was, 19, NRHG was really intended to be an intermediary to get us back to the point where we're considering an authority and what it would take to get us there and using this as the think tank, information sharing, coordination,

you know, thinking through what is it that we want to go and ask for and we go and ask for that funding, what exactly are we trying to do with it that we needed to establish that with this group of all of the stakeholders together.

So that's all I would add is that there is an authority on the books.

It just has not been utilized and is not applied yet.

And so I would add that at some point

Once we determine, right now we're looking at the governance model and the consultants will be coming back to us next month with the recommendations from their work with the partnership on what that governance model would look like for an authority.

And there may be a need to go to the legislature

I'm just not, we're not sure right now exactly what those might be.

So that'll be part of our discussion tomorrow.

Someone open for questions?

Alright, sounds good.

Alright, well with that, our next agenda item is our proposed meeting schedule

and we will need to take a vote on this.

You all had the packet so I guess you had an opportunity to look at the dates.

The only, the months that are a little different, we normally cancel our November meeting and our December meeting because they fall so close to Thanksgiving and Christmas and we split the difference.

So that would place our December meeting at December the 12th.

That's what we would normally do.

We have often canceled July, yes, and I noticed that it doesn't have July on.

Albemarle pounding very often cancels meetings in July, and it used to be that the city canceled meetings in July or August, but I don't even remember exactly.

So our culture has been to let people go on vacations and to do some break time,

and so you'll see that January, February, March, April, May, June, August, September, October, and then December.

I don't know if anyone has any concerns about any of those dates.

With that though, if those dates work, I would entertain a motion to approve the 2024 meetings measure.

So moved.

Thank you Mike.

Is there a second?

I'll second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

All right.

With that, transit provider updates.

Charmaine is not here, I don't, she's not my family, is she?

I've been updated for this month, other than to say that I was in semesters for Zoom, so we're in buses, started running back on a full-time schedule.

Some of the things that I think we recorded last month, or maybe our staffing is going really well.

Our drivers, we've been getting some new student drivers, and we continue the training, so we've actually added another bus onto one of our academic routes so we can show them the headways at the start of the semester.

The Gold Line pretty much runs

The other big piece of information I wanted to pass out to the group that Mike and I were briefly talking about beforehand is we issued an RFP I think after our October meeting where we were now in the selection process to look at our fixed route tracking software

And as you didn't know, we use TransLook to track our buses.

And we also use TransLook in the evening for our ongoing service.

And so we're just looking to see what's out there.

I came and asked the questions when I started, like, what are the options?

What are the services?

And our contract with TransLook is ending.

And so we put it out to bid.

So we're evaluating where we'll land.

Yes, ma'am.

We're always looking for improvements.

There are some, well, I'll share the one big thing that we don't like about it and that is that right now, if we go to make a change to a route for whatever reason, we need a trans look to publish that for us and that is a real challenge.

It slows it down.

So one of the things that this group has talked about a lot is to have everything from the user under Albemarle so that the users don't have to go if they're moving from CAT to UTS, whatever it might be,

that there's not a disconnect for the user signals.

So I don't want to put Mike on the spot, but I believe John put out an RFP to study that exact issue.

I'm not sure where it is, but I would say that is appealing to me, so our usual school

So the language has to be, the F.A.

language has to be in it.

from it.

It picks up the gold standard rating theory that all three be procuring the same and also recognizing that also is a bit of a mountain.

So I think interoperability has to be the key component of the solicitation.

Getting out of my knowledge, the technical interactions, but my understanding is Google Transit is one that if the files are set up correctly, that can then be shared.

We just want an R model.

We need to have our GTFS feed.

We're able to load up to

The challenge is when the software that we buy is proprietary.

So what you see on your phone is proprietary.

We have a couple of differences.

We're piggybacking on traffic.

We are engaged in a number of different studies right now and I can confirm that it is one of the concepts for sure, even coming from the vendors, this approach of many providers

Early on we're talking about that.

I'm not sure about, you know, I think we're bringing up a key procurement issue for sure, both in cost and language.

And I would also say that as we look at our options, what I've been suggesting is, you know, or put out a provider who may have pieces of the solution

There's lots of operational level questions.

We're trying to solve at the RTP level that we have institutionally with those two types of service.

So we don't want to lose this piece though for our, I'm just saying, for our writers to have a seamless experience.

And so I think all of us are not in our heads for the providers to somehow or another get together and see as we go through this process.

And maybe, I don't know enough about what you were, you got asked

to say that maybe Christine has looked at the authority.

I don't know if that will be something that could certainly be worked out through the idea of the authority.

I will start listening to this discussion at the table, right?

Or would that be too late?

I'm just not sure.

So once you commit to something, how long are you in that, or is that just completely dependent upon your organization and how long you want to commit with?

Coming from a larger system where we use the product called Clutter Devices.

There's the base and it's in the other systems.

If you put Clutter Devices, which does speak to others, that system once you put it on, you're never going to be able to do it.

Because it basically integrates on everything you use, from the scheduling software, to the signage, to everything.

And that is very interesting.

But it is necessary,

You want to know that kind of thing?

So that might come to a little bit of authority, might be able to help.

It's the authority you'll be able to have once a month, right?

It makes sense.

I can't tell you the dates for jobs right now in this moment.

All right.

Well, we're probably not going to solve this problem today.

Yeah, assuming the RTA goes forward, some part of the EMOUs that would have to be created, or just a single part of the EMOU would need to speak to this issue of interoperability.

I would envision this

It's RTA kind of evolving over the course of three to five years.

These are our goals for the first year, these are our goals for the second, these are our goals for the third.

The other service I briefly mentioned the on-demand service we are shifting So currently we actually outsource most of the driving for that through RMC and this year in the summer we are going to be pulling that in-house and

Out of our training ground, we have this long history of student drivers.

Of course, you need to get CDL to drive a transit bus.

So what we're hoping to do is by pulling operations, the driving for our BTS, or excuse me, our on-demand service at night, pull that into UDA employees that we're creating a higher use.

So you can start out just driving a car.

We actually have two Chevy Volts, we have minivans,

passenger vans, none of which require a CDL, but you can start driving for us on on-demand and maybe migrate to fixed route.

And if no one else has a question, I do.

I noticed in the paper somewhere where you all were

You certainly did, probably.

Yeah, would you mind just?

I will say that, yes, we have a contract with Proterra to, we have a contract with Proterra to purchase electric buses and installed charging infrastructure.

It had nothing to do with me.

I think all I can really say at this point is that it's kind of thrown a big lumpy wrench into our plans.

We are skillfully committed to our sustainability goals, fossil free, et cetera, and we just need to reevaluate what we're doing right now.

That's fair.

Great.

Any other questions?

All right.

You look like you might have something to say.

So a couple things.

We provided a recommendation to city council regarding our alternative fuel study which is a requirement for us from FTA that we go through the study and get to a place where there's a recommendation so we can get a transition plan written.

We made a presentation, I believe,

I think there's going to be more conversation with counsel.

And with that, I think we all have a direction.

What was recommended in our study, though, was kind of a dual approach with two pilots.

One with VDB and one with hydrogen fuel cell.

Both of them would be limited to between three to five vehicles.

And in that way, we'd be able to test them

secured funding from the state and FDA to get two VED buses ordered.

We can do that within the next, we're probably gonna do that within the next 60 days.

We're just waiting on the final, we're programming the money right now.

So as soon as that clears, then we'll be able to order the vehicles.

It takes us between 18 to 24 hours to order the vehicles anyway, so we got a little time

There's a whole host of decisions that have to be worked out in the additional space.

The piece of property is adjacent to that that we need to acquire to make all of this happen.

So that's the next piece that we'll have to have conversations with the city council about making that happen to get whatever fuel source we're going to do done.

We've also secured money to do

improvements to the facilities, adding two bays to support alternative fuel vehicles and support and money to do upgrades to our administrative building, actually building the new building to support administration.

We're also got great news to talk about in regards to micro transit, the micro cab project,

for Albemarle County.

I literally just left a meeting with the providers.

Our numbers are growing.

We clipped at a milestone.

We're over 100 providers a day.

Last three days, last two days, we've been 106 and 103.

So we're starting to pick up.

That's without any major advertisement that is coming.

So you will hear radio ads, print ads.

We're working on that and we're seeing

and the individuals in the region who are outside of that area and they want to know when are we going to expand the model.

Already they want to know that.

So there's a conversation that needs to happen.

There's a study that needs to happen that would support the idea of working, having conversations.

The TJPTC was the initial organization that started that.

We would go back through them.

Get them to revisit that and then look at what areas would expand that.

So whether it makes sense to do portions of downtown or all of downtown, potentially even adding some of them around the university, you need to figure out what that looks like.

That is the next major step that we've taught.

So right now, the original study was from TJPBC.

There was three zones that were looked at.

The Pantom Zone that looked at Martha Jefferson Hospital that came to the city edge, the city line.

The 29 zone, which

basically took in just above where the high school is, but now we've added the high school into the zone all the way to the airport up on 29 North.

The connection right now, you can go between the two zones, but you can't stop in this city, so you can go through the city, but you won't be able to stop.

That's where people are having a conversation about, they see the banks go through, they wanna know if they can get on, or can they end it

not to say that in the future that it couldn't, but that's the way that the original project was funded and we're working through it.

We had six vehicles, we're up to I think five vehicles at peak right now.

The sixth one will probably roll out in the next two to three weeks now that we're getting up over 100.

So the numbers are growing faster, as fast as we had hoped they would.

And hopefully it will go quicker once we do the advertising.

So I'm hopeful.

We're at a number where we thought we would be on the historical side of the ground here.

You talked about how we're getting your requests out of the area.

Absolutely.

We know exactly where those images are called, John.

Steven does a wonderful job.

And I would just add that in addition to the city, there are other urban Albemarle County areas that should be in the zone too.

Garland, do you have a sense of how many of the riders are people with disabilities?

You can see that I was trying to think of the reporting

Access has been made available to the county.

Yeah, that'd be great.

That'd be great.

Yes, please.

To comment on the micro-cap, congratulations.

First of all, I have not had a chance to use it yet, but I've heard great things.

I'm glad to hear you're meeting goals.

I've certainly seen the vehicles up around the door to urban rain where I often shop and recreate.

And I know you can't control the urn media that you've been getting.

There's been good stories of progress in WINA and everything.

But one thing I, when I hear them talk about microcath, they tend to just talk about the 29 North corridor, which makes it sound like you can just go from Barracks Road, or if you don't get to Barracks Road, Fashion Square to the airport.

And it doesn't talk about how many more services you can reach, some of the neighborhoods around that area.

So that's just a comment if you can, as much as possible, we can make sure people understand

We're still short.

We're making some progress on

Even if we wanted to add the service, I don't have the drivers to add the service yet.

Trying to get us back to where we were in the pandemic has been extremely challenging.

We don't have the number of vehicles, we don't have the number of drivers.

Hopefully we get more drivers as a part of

I had an interview with a guy today that I believe is going to be able to help Kat if we are able to get him.

Coming in as our assistant director of transit for maintenance and facilities.

He got FTA experience, worked at a couple of properties.

He has fleet management experience also.

So that would be extremely helpful to us.

He's been very good at

developing mechanics, putting a development program in place.

It's now figuring out whether we can afford them and get them in and out.

But I say all that and say we're working on it.

I'm going to put that out as fast as we can.

I've had conversations with the city manager about that specific thing.

I have one more question, sorry.

So we were just talking about connected services and interoperability of platforms, and I am now reminded, oh yes, we have built CAP on the backbone of VIA, which I imagine is very territorial for our company.

Can you help us understand as we're looking to scale both

and also looking to scale and implement the region, what some of the consequences of that bargain might be.

Consequences of not doing what?

It's only, so, in the larger trade of the world,

Then there starts to get too expensive, we put an RFP out, we get another one, and make it work, so we keep our cost model down.

We control it by managing them well and managing the process as well.

As we expand, I don't see why they would, from the public, they don't know it's via, they think it's capital, and it is capital.

We are managing that situation.

Anything happens, they call,

and I did a report where I'm directly connected to the operations manager and to their national office.

We were on call the other night in the Stone House.

I didn't have a call at the Stone House, so I needed to get more information.

I left them out a little bit on a couple of things, but that was my fault.

So the contract with VIA was two years?

If I could add, this was a part of an overall grant process.

They had a lot of assessment around the model, how it would be and the decision to go and do third party.

was done through collaboration with the city and county.

That approach was presented to the board of supervisors and that really led the direction for us to do an RFP.

That RFP resulted in several applicants via hands down the top candidate for their scale, their operations, performance feedback, cost, efficiency,

This is a pilot and that the county will be covering the full cost next year of this two-year service.

And that's a decision that the county, the board, and the team will have to wrestle with on what that looks like moving forward.

So it is a pilot.

There's decisions that can be made around how it would continue, but it was a very thorough

And then Albemarle County, so it was a combination of DRPT and Albemarle County.

Does that help?

Any other?

comments or questions.

That's great.

I thought I read something about hydrogen as being part of something coming out of the alternative fuel study.

One is that accurate.

Two, it surprised me a little bit because when we did ours, it sounded like one of the big challenges.

It sounded very appealing.

One of the big challenges was supply.

And so I was interested to know if there's been a breakthrough on supply that maybe we didn't know about six, 12 months ago that could be

It's very real.

So the federal government has listed these hydrogen supply sites.

One of them is in Appalachian or it's in West Virginia area.

Thank you.

Where is it?

West Virginia.

There you go.

West Virginia and then the other one here is West Virginia.

West Virginia is somewhere.

So there's two sites that are going to be fairly close to us within four to six hours of drive.

So it is a realistic possibility of having the Irish in as a food source now.

West Coast has been using it for years.

There's a transit agency we were trying to set up a tour to take some council if they wanted to go to AC Transit and Montgomery County.

Well no, first time I'm going to A.C. Chains, which was in Oakland, California, and then we noticed that there was a closer example, which was Montgomery County, Maryland.

It's a lot closer.

Correct.

So the first pilot would start with the purchase.

We put the order in.

If we get in quicker, we may get it sooner.

But it's usually 18 months for a vehicle to arrive for us.

So we would order two battery electric, whatever, is on the state contract right now.

And I think the state contract has pulled Terra off the state contract list.

Sorry.

So it's Gillick and New Flyer.

that are on the list at this point in time.

So we would make a decision between those two, order the two, and then work with the team to get the infrastructure built out by the time the other two got here to support charging.

On the hydrogen side, hydrogen vehicles are about $100,000 more expensive than the battery electric ones, which by the way, battery electric vehicles are about $1.2 million apiece.

and to that means hydrogen is about 1.3 million.

And if we were to get those, the timeline on that is roughly the same as roughly about 20 months to get it.

Not 18, it's 20 to 24 months, is what we're being told.

we're talking about huge numbers.

Did I miss anything, Ben?

I just want to let Ben and the team, so that effort of trying to get battery electric or getting us to zero emission has not just been a cap effort.

They've been developing services, which is where Ben is housed, the Office of Sustainability has been in this.

We've also had conversations

with other transit agencies all around.

Kimberly Horn, who's our consultant on this.

They have brought in experts from the West Coast.

John Jackson, he's also the planning manager for the state transition optimization.

Alternative fuel transition, but he's the point person there, so same consultant firm.

We have an engineer that worked with Arlington.

So it goes back to again, money.

Lots of money.

And the authority.

And my understanding is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if we

figure out the governance model and get an authority up and running to figure out how we're going to pay for some of this.

The authority can put money towards both capital and operational.

Absolutely.

The vehicle is, we're only paying 4% of the 1.2 million,

So the infrastructure and the vehicles themselves.

True.

Right, gotcha, interesting.

Great conversation.

Oh, yes, schools.

Yes, we cleared out a witness, so.

Yay!

We can improve from where we are and kind of circle schools in the future.

So we'll be prepared by August of this year to see you carry more students.

We've got to add drivers to that.

I guess I would start by saying it's January.

And if you're smarter than me, which isn't that hard to do, and somebody asks you to go run a transit agency, tell them I'll be there in a minute.

Because week one, two, and three with the snow is not

All kidding aside, busy few weeks here this new year.

There is a lot to do at Jaunt both internally and externally with policies, practices, relationships.

I expect to post eight roles next week because there are places

and we have plans for a new work chart in place and so there's going to be a hiring phase happening and we're trying to create a place that's a desirable place to be, a great place to work and so there's a lot of intention on that internal stuff.

For this group, more of an external focus.

There's several studies in place and a grant award that we were just notified about the other day.

So we're looking at electrification in an implementation phase study where we did all the feasibility.

Katie knows that we're thinking about this in another serious way in a follow-up to our TDP that you're wondering, you know,

is now the time, do we have enough of the data to start putting this into our capital program because the capital program is due to the OPD one week from today.

And so for example, one of our recommendations would be pilot this with one of the connect routes.

Well, if that's the case, it's impossible with our current infrastructure because all we have is two of the slow chargers on site.

We would need a fast charger in addition to the vehicle, right?

that there are some obstacles that we need to be overcome in order to enact these next steps.

Outside of electrification, we've also got a rural transit needs study with the folks of CERCOM and North Dakota State.

I'm pretty sure North Dakota, not South Dakota.

Thank you.

and I met with those folks just the other day and those of you who are part of that process, you can expect a March meeting based on that conversation with Jeremy.

We also have a micro-transit study underway.

I'm really interested in what's happening and focused more on this community

My predecessor was invested in expanding, particularly with one vendor, perhaps, you know, I want to figure out what works best from a community perspective, more to come on that.

And then finally, I would say that the state, the Dominion Power actually, was award level, one and a half million dollars roughly for something called Project Sink the other day.

John was one of the early collaborators with that and there are four or five other agencies and I have folks from Dominion that I'll meet with next week to find out how we get upon that and that is potentially a funding source not just from the plant

Any questions from Mark?

Yeah, I will definitely second the, we're really excited about the New Dominion Department of Energy grant because that does have planning and on route in the service area.

That's really exciting.

And then on the rail side, and this is our last meeting, the rail team was successful into FRA quarter IT grants for passenger, to study passenger rail on my Commonwealth quarter, which is the east-west passenger rail corridor.

and the new main western corridor, which is DC to Bristol, so both of which pass through Charlottesville in their service area.

So we will likely have a webpage up on that with more information as the work gets started.

And then the Virginia breeze route, the stop in Charlottesville is moving from Erisco Shopping Center to the

to raise IC support for the needs assessment is including the next several weeks and then we'll have a draft by the end of the month.

So more information on that, including two route expansions that would include Charlottesville.

Plus the sessions happening,

Really small one.

You said the east-west was called the Commonwealth Corridor.

Does the DC Bristol have any?

Any other questions for me?

Alright.

I guess that takes care of the updates.

A lot of good information today.

So we'll move to

Yeah, I was hoping Curtis would still be here for this item because he's really the manager for the Safe Streets and Roads for All.

So we got commitment from all six of our jurisdictions.

We've been working with a consultant team on getting the project launched and moving forward.

And our first major event was held earlier this month.

We had a regional summit where we invited stakeholders from all six of our jurisdictions to come and meet together and talk about maybe where the concerns are, what challenges there are, and maybe communicating or getting buy-in to move forward with projects, and then who the essential stakeholders are that need to be engaged in this process.

So we're looking forward to moving forward on the next step, which is going to be to

to go to each of the jurisdictions to seek a commitment to participating in the study and setting a target to reduce roadway fatalities and serious injuries.

So we'll be seeing all of you at your locality meetings here in the next month.

There was a lot of information that was received.

I think the consultant team is going to be processing all of those, but it wasn't like we need to do these, like it wasn't necessarily developing strategies.

It was really helping inform how do we engage the public well and what are the concerns that that group was already aware of that they thought needed to be at least part of the discussion.

Yeah, the recommendations will come at the end of the planning process.

You'll get something like that.

Yep, just want to give you a brief update.

So the MPO is working through the Long Range Transportation Plan.

We need to have the plan adopted by May.

So it feels like we've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work, but we've been processing a lot of data, receiving a lot of public feedback, and we're ready to put all of this information together and start identifying the projects that we are going to be prioritizing.

So again, for those of you that maybe have a little bit less familiarity, one of the really important things that the long-range transportation plan does is it allows the urbanized area, the MPO area, to identify their priority transportation improvements that they want to potentially be seeking funding for over the next several rounds.

And one of the reasons that this is important is because demonstration of the regional commitment to a lot of these projects is required as

as an initial eligibility step in order to receive funding for projects.

So we have all our data that we've gone through as far as our needs prioritization.

We have the public feedback.

We have a couple of other data sources that we're going to pull in regarding safety needs and areas where we know that the system capacity is going to be limited in the future and places where there are going to be constraints.

And we're going to

The MPO staff is going to be working with localities staff to start sort of matching where are their concerns that we've identified and what projects do we have lined up that can help meet those needs.

We also want to make sure that we are including any high priority projects that the localities have already identified and making sure that those are

feeding into the plan.

It just occurs to me that we were talking about the changes that were going to happen to smart scale.

And I think they have finally decided.

So those now

is now firmed up and we know exactly what the frontier is.

Exactly, and they changed it again.

Do you want me to go through this?

So the first discussion was there are different scoring criteria.

So the way SmartScale works is it's a competitive process.

You submit your applications and it's scored against another number of factor areas.

That includes economic development, safety, congestion mitigation.

We'll see if I can remember them all.

Land use, environmental factors, and accessibility.

So one of the big discussion items was regarding, and the one that they changed their mind and flip-flopped a little bit back and forth on was land use.

Land use as a benefit score is really kind of measuring how, where a project is located and is it helping to connect things that are in close proximity to each other.

So it's kind of a measurement of density, but one of the purposes of the land use scoring measure is to incentivize what they refer to as transportation efficient land use, meaning

supporting like good growth management strategies.

And the types of projects that got a lot of benefit points from land use were bicycle and pedestrian projects and transit projects.

And one of the concerns that had come up is that a lot of the funding that was identified as wanting to be put towards or being prioritized for high priority projects

was going to some of these projects that were considered to have smaller levels of impact.

And so there was an effort to kind of recalibrate the program to make sure that the land use score wasn't driving so much of the project selection.

So in December, the CTB voted to eliminate land use as a scoring measure completely.

And then there was some concern that maybe that was not in compliance with some of the regulations that were written into the smart scale policies.

And so in January, they went back and reversed that decision.

Land use is still going to carry less weight than it did because it is now a multiplier, which is what was originally proposed by the OIB staff when they were reviewing the project guidelines.

The other major changes are to the types of projects that are going to be eligible for the high priority program funding.

So there are two funding pots with smart scale, there's the high priority program funding, which is competitive statewide, and then there's funding that's dedicated to each of the cold pepper or each of the VDOT

construction districts, which is a smaller pot of money.

And so there were some additional restrictions put on the types of projects that would qualify for receiving that statewide money.

And most of those projects are really intended to be capacity improvement projects or really major projects.

So things like new lanes, access management projects, interchange improvements,

Help me out, Katie.

I forget the exact language, but it's like new corridors for freight and rail.

fixed guideway transit and then the other one that they added that wasn't discussed prior to the December meeting was a set of improvements as long as it includes all of the preferred alternatives that were identified in a VDOT supported project.

So VDOT supports different like

corridor studies and things like that.

If any one of those improvements in that corridor study doesn't meet one of those other requirements, that would make the project eligible for the high priority program.

If you submit all of the recommendations that were identified together as one project, that could qualify as a project.

So the other thing I'll mention is that

When we're talking about what it qualifies to receive funding through the high priority program, you're talking about the principal improvement or the main sort of project that can receive funding.

You can add other elements to it.

So you can do an interchange improvement with a shared use path or something like that.

You're welcome.

That is the criteria change, but we now have it locked in and we know what the criteria is because we're not going to get smart scale funding if we can't match up the criteria with our projects and projects with criteria.

So, that's good.

Yeah, so just very quickly again, we reviewed this at the MPO Policy Board meeting last night.

The TIP is sort of the schedule of federal funding allocations within the MPO area.

So any adjustments, it's a document that's approved by the MPO and any changes if they exceed a certain level also have to be approved by the MPO.

So there are just a couple of these bigger changes that I wanted to mention to you.

The first one is that we added a project into the TIP regarding some capital improvements to the CAT facility.

There you go.

So we've got two projects that are on our radar.

One is facility improvements to the maintenance.

We're adding two bays to support alternative vehicles.

And then the second one is maintenance

And the existing building we would do some reprogramming and that would become the training facility.

So we've actually got money from the state to do the NEPA and 30% design on both of those.

So hopefully as soon as we get our project manager hired.

And then the other amendment that I'll mention to you all is that we also had to add in the federal funding that has been allocated for the TJPDC's mobility management program.

So the mobility management program started to be funded in October and we secured a partnership with Java, the Jefferson area board for aging to provide the services and we're starting a call center so that somebody can call in and help get like a transportation counselor who will walk them through the steps will refer to the transit agencies first, Kat and John

and then continue kind of down the list of public providers trying to help them find something that works for them.

So we started, we're open for services now starting in January and we have an 800 number and a temporary website and staff and so we're starting to take some calls.

We also have a data system set up to collect all the data and currently I'm working on

a proposal for funding for fiscal year 2025.

And we'll ask for another staff member for half of that year.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would just add to that.

I happened to have had the pleasure to present to them.

Flo Vana works with others last night.

Hal earned his presentation as well.

Any other comments or questions?

Then that is it.

We're on to other business.

Last night there was a VDOT open house program on a proposed park and ride facility in Crozet, and so in case anyone wasn't aware, I wanted to let you know that they are still accepting comments on that through February 5th, and they can be through the mail, through email, and I have contact information if anyone would like to submit any comments on that proposed park and ride facility.

It is pretty close right off of 64 at exit 107.

It is, yes, Patterson Mill Lane.

And so it is just, you know, a couple quick turns and then you're right there.

They will have proposed

Parking, obviously, as well as bike facilities, and then it will be a proposed transit stop for the Afton Express.

And I know John is also potentially looking at that for some of their Connect, or in the conversations for that.

So there will be a separate area or circle for transit and then parking over here to make it really easy for pedestrians to be out of the way and nice and safe.

Was it just racks or was it covered tempted by storage?

I believe it is just racks.

Thanks.

I have one other thing.

Oh, sure.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have the dates right now.

So, we're at a point where in our transit strategic plan, we completed basically chapters one

Hopefully we get in front of council in February, March.

So we're probably getting in front of council in March.

We're almost there.

Alright, anybody else with other business?

I have one thing just to remind folks, and I said this at the last meeting, but I'll remind everybody again,

So as you all remember, VDOT worked on and completed the Gray Separation Interchange at Rio.

And when they finished that, they moved down to hydraulic.

And so the pay for projects at hydraulic are now under construction.

There's work going on.

Shovels will be going into the ground pretty soon.

Not quite yet.

They're working on utilities right now.

Everybody needs to be aware.

A roundabout is going in at Whole Foods so that we'll have a roundabout there.

As soon as that roundabout is completed, it will move up and a roundabout will go in at Stonefield.

So we'll have two roundabouts and there will be

Some restrictions, you won't be able to go down hydraulic towards 29 and make a left at some point.

That will change.

You'll have to use the roundabout.

As everybody probably knows here, the hydraulic intersection is one of the most dangerous in the state.

The problem is for pedestrians and vehicles, and many of the crashes were T-bones.

from people making left-hand turns on the 29 and more.

That's what they're trying to help with.

Having said that, the good news for this particular group is that a pedestrian bridge will also be going to over 29 that will connect the Albemarle County Stonefield corner

to the Charlottesville corner, Regal Cagmar, yesterday.

So that's one for you to describe it right now.

So we'll have a pedestrian bicycle bridge that will go across and both sides will have transit stops.

You can go onto the VI website where they have the projects and they have a lot of information about that project that they're all doing.

But I just wanted to remind people because you may have questions from people about what in the world is going on right now.

Unless there are any other comments or questions or business, you all usually don't mind if I adjourn us early.