MPO Policy Board Meeting   8/23/2023

Awesome.

Thank you.

Miss Monti here.

No problem.

Mr Minor.

Mr Konig.

And Miss Jacobs is running a little, she's, oh, she is.

So are there any members of the public present who would like to provide comments?

We have three minutes for our speaker.

Please come around to the black panel.

My name is Stuart Gardner, resident of Charlottesville.

I have a background in transportation.

I currently work in transportation advocacy.

I'm also on the board of the Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee.

However, today I'm just representing myself and not the committee.

So I understand today you're going to be briefed on proposed changes to SmartScale.

SmartScale has done great things for Virginia, added a lot more transparency into what programs get chosen to be funded, how that process works.

But there are a couple proposed changes that are going to be briefed on today that I want to just highlight for you all.

The first is proposed changes would greatly reduce the funding available for transit, bike, and pedestrian projects.

Transit, bike, and pedestrian projects reduce funding for those things.

I think our community wants those types of projects, wants those types of infrastructure funded.

And I think it goes without saying that those types of forms of transportation are cleaner and should be types of things that we should be encouraging as a community, not discouraged.

Second, by eliminating or reducing land use as a separate evaluation factor, we're basically failing to encourage smart growth.

Economic development, land use, transportation, these things should be evolving together.

They should be considered together as we make transportation planning and funding decisions.

Both of these proposed changes in smart scale could limit the ability to do that.

So that's all the time.

I just want to say thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hi, my name is Paul Grady, I'm just outside of Crozet, and I actually have a request.

As Ann can attest, I made about 10 presentations to the Chart Committee in 2002 and 2003 of transportation projects.

Actually, one of them made it in the 2025 plan.

only to discover later that we didn't need.

So I would like to ask the board if I could make two presentations to you in the next couple of months.

One would be a short one, one would be a fairly involved.

I would need to go a little bit more about presentations and just talk about my colleagues and stuff like that.

Well, I can tell you that the short one would be two revenue sharing projects, one in the city and one in the county that might result in a third party picking up part or most or all of the city or county share of the revenue sharing.

The other one would be a fairly large project that has to do with the hydraulic 29-250.

Since this is really a type of question to per se, do you think you could

I'm happy to give you my email address.

I think you probably have seen this as well.

Do you email all of us with what you're wanting to talk about?

I'll see if we can find some way to engage you on that.

Okay.

Yeah, but I appreciate you coming.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate your advocacy in the past.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm Peter Kreps from the Human Environmental Council.

I was going to talk about the changes to smart scale, but they were very well for some interest now.

I would go further to add that the changes that are prescribed or that are envisioned, they're not only philosophically bad, they're kind of in

We're very concerned about what's happening with smart scale.

is actually just disingenuous.

We would like the full picture of Mindy's to be included in the smart scale algorithm, which isn't perfect, but it's pretty great.

And then also just secondarily, I wanted to just express my own personal, but I think PC would agree that it's so great that you guys are planning to work with the next MPO.

I don't know what that is.

The SAWMPA collaboration, I think it is great and so happy to see it.

So thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

Any other questions in the room?

Anyone online who would like to speak?

So we have the agenda in front of us.

It's on the web page.

There is a request for staff to add an item to the agenda, which is a discussion of updates to the funding formula for NGOs.

So I would ask please for a motion

to accept the agenda with the additional discussion with Ireland.

Second?

We have a motion with a second.

I think we just raised hands, is that right?

All in favor for accepting the agenda?

Aye.

Okay.

You want it closed?

All right, motion carries.

Okay, so July 26, 2023, meeting minutes.

I'll bring the revision to meeting minutes as presented.

Could I have a motion, please, to adopt the meeting minutes?

Second.

Second.

Okay, motion and second.

All in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Anybody opposed?

Okay, we have the meeting minutes.

Great.

The fourth item, FY 2014, is the transportation of the government, government, and many of it.

And it's a shadow for New York's family and guests.

So as you may recall, we approved the twenty four twenty seven transportation improvement program not that long ago.

But we did receive a request from the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, which is the new authority in Virginia.

They split out sort of the freight rail and passenger rail operations.

So this is the new entity that was created to oversee the passenger rail.

They got confirmation that they were able to use CMAQ, the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality funding, in order to support state supported passenger rail service.

So what they would like to do is they would like to use some of the CMAQ funding to support improved services between Roanoke and the eastern part of the state.

And so what they are doing right now is going through a series of requests to add the allocations

for the CMAQ funding just based on the service within each of the MPOs that would have the service sort of transversing it.

So the request would be to add $9.2 million just about for between fiscal years 24 and 27 of CMAQ funding to our transportation improvement plan to support the passenger rail service from Roanoke.

Where does it come from?

It is coming through our rails.

But it is on our track.

Correct.

No, this is additional funding beyond what has already been allocated to our MPO.

So this is basically our agreement to amend the plan when it's on existence.

Okay, great.

Do we have any questions on it?

Okay.

Okay, could I please have a motion

Yes, before you leave if you don't mind.

Research.

Yeah.

Yes, thank you.

So I forgot to mention this at the start of the microphone.

I'm going to do it, you know, it's not going to be moving to the point of 50, I think.

So there was a crash this morning on the 49th, is that right, in which two people died.

And then there was also a crash, thank you, sir, on this head, on 250 year old Albemarle's armament.

You know, we want to bring this up just to sort of inform the fact that what they did with the government

I don't know if there's anything more you wanted to mention about that or any commentary you guys had?

Yeah, I will say that the last three months, we have had just not this industry, but in the hope that I encountered, we've had quite a few big ideas.

So we've been seeing vehicles, multiple vehicles, some had pretty much a big development.

We investigate all the details in terms of what was the cause of what was going on in terms of what was going on in terms of what was going on in terms of what was going on in terms of what was going on in terms of what was going on.

I don't know if there's anything that was wrong in the geometry of the road.

Is there anything else that you have potentially prevented through that accident?

We wait for it to be done through the community blog to see if there's anything from a transportation perspective that we need to do to enhance the wilderness and to talk to them and say hello.

Yeah, I think it's interesting when you get further down the road, I don't know where we all know about that.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

The Shackleford is going to provide public engagement efforts to data.

So we've been working through this month to get out into the community and to hear feedback right now.

So this is just a summary of where we are at this point.

Starting in February, we held some different stakeholder committee meetings with different segments of the population.

So we had 25 people participate in that.

And then we... You're welcome to come up to the table if you'd like to.

And then we started with a virtual informational webinar in a drop-in open house at our office right here, and that had fairly low attendance, which we weren't incredibly surprised about, but we knew that we would have to spend a lot of time and effort going out into the community to get the engagement we were hoping for.

So as of this morning, actually, we've got one more response this morning.

We've had 315 responses on the MetroQuest survey and UVA is going to be sending it out this week, I think.

So hoping to get a little bit more, especially from the younger demographic, which is a little bit underrepresented in the survey.

And then to date, we have had nine additional public intercepts where we have been out in the community.

So we've been to the transit center.

We've been working with CRHA.

I'm in the process of visiting all the CAC meetings.

We went to the center at Belvedere and we attended two national night out events both with Albemarle and Charlottesville.

And so far, our in-person public engagement, we've talked to another 168 community members.

And so our total outreach count to date is a little bit over 500 individuals.

So we're fairly pleased that we've had this level of response so far.

understanding that there will be an additional phase of public engagement.

But just wanted to let you all know, give you some progress.

And of course, we still have some additional CAC meetings that we'll be attending, as well as the CACV, the Joint Visitor Board between Charlottesville and Albemarle will also be speaking there.

So we have a couple more to date, but we feel like we've tried especially to reach

maybe what we might refer to as vulnerable populations, especially in our outreach today.

So just wanted to give you a quick update on that before we get into the more technical content about the data analysis related to the plan.

Any questions on the public engagement?

Yeah.

Yes, please.

Yes, I meant to come back to it.

Thank you.

Do you want to introduce yourself, Captain Bayou?

Sure.

Hello everyone.

My name is Darryl Vars, having a call after representative for the Commonwealth of Transportation.

Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.

All right, so you may recall that we got a grant through the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment to develop a performance-based prioritization process that we would be using for our long-range transportation plan.

So the purpose of this is to help us develop a process that we would apply to the data analysis aspect of identifying where there are system improvement needs in our region.

So I want to start off this conversation by saying that the data is only one piece of information.

So looking at the system performance, the way the numbers are telling the story, this is only one part of the story that we need to make sure that we're considering as part of the identification of the system needs.

We are also asking the public in our region where are their problems and what kinds of solutions would you like to implement.

That is going to be another layer of consideration in addition to the data analysis aspect.

And then the third thing that we'll also need to review and look at is to determine is the data and the information that we're getting through the public engagement and the data analysis aligned with the locality priorities.

So that's something else that we will also be considering.

So we are just talking today about the data analysis part of the planning process, which is a required step in the development of long-range transportation plans.

So we worked with the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment to develop a scope that basically has two different phases.

The first is that we are identifying the system needs.

So we're going to start off by saying, based on our analysis of the data, where do we see them as critical needs based on the goals and objectives that we develop as a region?

And then from there, there will be a second phase where we're actually prioritizing projects.

So we're going to start looking at needs, look at where we have projects that would resolve those needs that we identify.

From there, that's going to help us start limiting down the projects that we want to work through as far as prioritization and as far as developing sort of our prioritized constraint list.

And then where we might have a need but we don't have a project ready to meet that need, that would be a planning priority.

So that's a gap need where we know we need to look to see what can we do to figure out what kinds of improvement we want to implement in those areas.

So the general process is that this will be kind of similar to the way the state does its prioritization.

We're going to identify the measures that we're going to use to evaluate the data.

We're going to calculate a raw score that will then be standardized so we can combine data from a lot of different sources together and get relative priorities and comparison on all of these different measures that we're looking at.

and then we'll be able to apply the weighting for each of those measures that we identify as part of our, that is informed by our public engagement in order to identify needs that consider all of our goals and measures across all of the scoring areas.

Any questions about the general approach?

Okay.

As a refresher, the five areas that are in bold represent our five goals that we discussed and landed on as far as what would make us feel like we were improving the transportation system in our areas.

That's safety, looking at roadway and pedestrian safety, multimodal accessibility.

In this category, we're measuring access to jobs by different modes of transportation.

I want you to hold that thought that probably is coming to a lot of people's minds right now about why are we focusing on jobs here because we're going to focus on other non-work destinations in this land use coordination piece.

The efficiency and economic development, this is where we are measuring the system operations as far as capacity.

So we're looking at both congestion and system reliability here, as well as how

any sort of system deficiencies might impact bus transit performance.

And then finally, we're looking at environmental impacts.

So I'm going to go through all of those.

And basically what I want our outcome to be from our discussion today is to make sure that you all understand

what we're measuring with this data, understand that it will be really good at measuring some things and it might not capture other things that are important.

So I want you to understand the data.

And then I also want to make sure that the way we are defining needs is agreed upon by you all today.

So I'm not asking for a vote formally, I'm just asking for a general discussion and consensus on where, how you would like us to evaluate each of these performance measures.

So for each of these needs, for each of those measures that we've identified, part of the scope of the project was to develop different thresholds that we would be able to utilize in terms of defining what a need is in order for that need to be considered as part of the scoring criteria.

So the thresholds, the minimum threshold will determine whether or not a project is eligible to receive any score for that performance measure.

And then the consultants develop two different threshold options for each measure, and they have different implications depending on which of the thresholds we use.

So that's what I'm going to talk through today.

All right, so the first performance measure we're looking at is roadway safety needs.

And this is fairly straightforward.

So the threshold is really based on the potential for safety improvement ranking.

And so this is a predictive process that VDOT uses to sort of give you an indication of how many crashes they might anticipate would be happening at an intersection or along a roadway segment.

The potential for safety improvement is based on where there are more crashes than would be indicated through that predictive modeling process.

So VDOT ranks all of these.

You probably hear this when you talk about V-Trans needs or maybe when we're identifying pipeline projects, you might hear this potential for safety improvement ranking listed.

So the PSI ranking is only going to indicate, again, the threshold of what should be evaluated as part of the needs criteria.

the actual need is going to take that PSI ranking and look at whatever intersections or segments fall into the threshold that we choose and then use this weighting process that's called equivalent property damage only, which basically says that we're going to look at how many crashes occur at these different levels of severity and standardizes how they're weighting.

So crashes that have higher, I guess, intensities or more serious injuries or fatalities related to them.

are going to have higher needs indicated based on this weighting.

So the actual need prioritization is going to be based on the number and severity of crashes, but the PSI ranking is going to indicate which segments and intersections would be evaluated under that next step.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but for anybody who's really interested in the details of it is given that it's in your packet.

So the first threshold that we're discussing again related to this PSI is we can either look at all PSI intersections and segments that have three or more crashes in a five-year analysis period.

So basically anything that has regular crash activity there beyond what would be expected.

Or we could limit this to looking at our top 10 miles of PSI segments and top 20 PSI intersections within the boundaries.

The implication of the first one is that you'll have more projects that would get a safety score.

The implication of the second one is we would only be focusing on the places where there are really, really more significant safety needs relative to the other locations throughout the region.

So MPO Tech recommended using this first criteria.

They felt like they wanted to capture all locations where there could be a safety improvement.

And again, the really serious areas are still going to rise to the top and get a higher score regardless.

But what this means is that there would be more intersections and segments that would be eligible to receive a score in that criteria.

I think the idea, though, is that we're trying to look at areas where there is

I think this is going to be a whole lot of segments that fall into a category.

Yeah.

Yes.

So the number two goal was how do you balance miles and miles and miles in the rural areas?

Well, yeah, that will that probably will likely happen because you think of where the most severe crashes are occurring.

They're going to be occurring where there's a lot of traffic and where people are going high speeds as far as the over total numbers of these.

You're also this is also dividing it into segments.

So if there are

If there's more than one crash on a long, rural road, if it's all happening within a close area, that will be captured as part of this segment, but it may not necessarily all show up as happening on the same segment in order to trigger that threshold.

But I think what you might be indicating with that comment, Supervisor Malik, is that you want, if there's a safety need, regardless of if it's within the top 10 or the top 20, top 10 segments or top 20 intersections, that should be captured in this process.

Yes.

I just have no way of predicting other than what Charles has said about anything really to get in the media without love.

I can jam into that love here and not be able to do anything with it.

So I don't know if it's possible to have a first run of something as a look at the pilot area and find out what we see.

I think my goal tonight was to start with like a philosophical discussion to see what maybe resonates with us as far as, you know, do we want to focus anywhere where there's a safety improvement that we could make or just on the most severe crashes and be prioritizing those.

But I think we can potentially do multiple iterations.

Can we do tech to work out?

thoughts on why they might have chosen this one.

But I think we're really looking at accumulating all of these over a number of different performance measures.

So it's not just the safety.

We'll get a lot of indicators showing up for the safety analysis, but we're going to be doing this for all of the other.

I think there are 11 performance measures as well.

So we're going to get a lot of intersections.

I think we just want to see really close.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, regardless of these, the top 10 miles of PSI segments and top 20 PSI intersections, even under this first one, are going to show as like a higher need.

So if we go with what's been suggested, it sounds like we'll still be able to see these patterns

So are people comfortable with that?

Yep.

Yep.

Okay, and this just shows, I don't want to focus too much on like what's being indicated here, but this shows a little bit of what the outputs are going to look like.

So, you know, and again, remember, we're going to be doing this across all of the performance measures.

And so once we look at all of the needs, we'll have these maps that are showing places where there are the highest cumulative needs based on

I'm going to reiterate, she's probably going to show you a map after each one of these.

Don't put too much in that map because it's part of the sample.

It's to demonstrate what the output will look like.

But I know it's easy for us to go through and be like, well, wait, but it's not identifying this one space and this one road.

That's not the actual limit.

Yeah.

So the PSI is really focusing on the roadway crashes.

So then we also want to make sure that in terms of supporting our equity approach to evaluating the system performance, as well as also supporting the climate action priorities that we've identified, that we're also looking at other modes of transportation.

And so to do that, we are also using data from the pedestrian safety action plan that VDOT develops.

Even though it's called a pedestrian safety action plan, the most recent version of the map also includes bike crashes and bike improvement recommendations as well.

So I do want to highlight that, but VDOT is also in the process of updating this plan to better highlight that it is for vulnerable road users, which is primarily transit users, bicycle and pedestrian movements.

So this is basically based on this plan what VDOT has done is they've identified a number of priority corridors that based on their characteristics would indicate that there's a high need to implement safety improvements along those that would support pedestrian activity along those corridors.

This is predictive.

So the discussion in the pedestrian safety action plan is that

is that the number of pedestrian and bicycle crashes is fairly low overall.

And so it's not adequate to just look at where historic bicycle and pedestrian crashes are occurring, but you want to know what are the characteristics that would make those dangerous situations where people might need to travel.

And so it's based on looking at crash history in addition to the design speed of the roads, number of lanes, traffic volumes,

as well as demographics and land uses to determine where there might be characteristics where someone might need to travel along those or between activity generators within those areas.

So based on that analysis, the thresholds that we would be choosing between would either be to use the top 1% of corridors that are shown here in red, which would be along primarily the larger corridors where there's higher traffic volume.

or to use the top 5% of corridors, which would include, in addition to the red, would also include more of the blue areas, which are more of the local roadway systems.

No, I don't believe that.

I don't believe there are errors outside of this.

And is this looking retrospectively or is this also in proactively?

I have to go back and check what they constituted as the land uses, but it is looking at the crash history, but I think it's also looking at what the activity generators are within these areas and where people might be walking from and to.

So, I certainly do appreciate what people wanted to grab in the top five facility, which is the top one percent.

It looks as if the top one percent

I just wonder if you might get more concrete results by focusing on the 1% versus spreading the effort perhaps too broadly.

What does he know?

I kind of tend to read.

is a lot.

Yeah, we're using this information also for our program, like how we're saving for the program, and bringing all this information to a pinpoint where it is with projects also.

So, even though she had both of them, that's quite a bit of data that you're going to have to go through to look at potential professional competition.

Now, we would dare say that we're the ones, and we blew up probably

that may not have infrastructure in place to facilitate it.

No, there wasn't really, honestly, there was a lot of consensus right away on this one.

So there wasn't a lot of discussion on maybe potentially why they might choose one versus the other.

I think

Some of this might just be generally being supportive of these bicycle and pedestrian projects.

And again, remember, one of the requirements to qualify for funding for a lot of these programs is that projects are indicated in the long-range plan.

I think it might give us a longer list, but we're still going to be prioritizing, but the top priorities are probably going to be pretty similar regardless.

With the top 1%?

Either one?

OK.

OK.

Were you going to say something?

I mean, it's just looking at the fact that it says that the top 1% focuses on foreign industry.

Highways, emphasize major highways.

Oh yeah.

Well, the top 5% also includes the local roads.

This is pedestrian safety.

So you would think, I don't know, now I'm trying to make up that.

Well, but it's 29, it's Pan Tops where you have people walking.

but do you really have, I guess the intersections based on the intersections can provide different issues for those pedestrians but the actual pathways between the intersections are going to be very similar, would be my guess.

So to just box out the local roads where there's likely more pedestrian activity.

I would think we'd want to capture.

to see if there are safet

So like Key West, there's that little blue section out there by Darden Tow.

And then all those little blue sections to be the north of 250.

I mean, yeah, that's a major pedestrian safety issue over there in front of Darden Tow, right in front of the public park that wouldn't be included if we didn't have the 5% there.

I mean, you can probably nitpick things that don't have blue or red lines in the same way, but, um, I'm shocked that 20 is not on there.

I guess I don't know how the 1%, what defines the corridors to look at that, to even draw the red line, but a little spice up.

This is all within the MPO area.

This one is a little bit more complicated because we're basically developing a measure.

But the multimodal accessibility is really about helping us understand where are there places where it's hard for people to travel or access jobs based on their location.

And so, again, we're using this

I just lost my train of thought.

But we're using this, we're using jobs as sort of like our standard to understand access.

But remember that we're also, we also have this land use coordination piece.

And so they're kind of two different sides of the same coin.

So in this place, we're saying, where can we improve access to jobs based on how people are already traveling and where they may be able to go from the locations where they're starting from?

and then the land use coordination is going to measure how can we support transportation efficient land use decisions and prioritizing that of the other side.

So this is really only telling us half of a story for this particular measure.

So in order to capture this multimodal accessibility, we're developing a measure called potential for accessibility improvement.

And what this does is that it is going to measure how many jobs are currently accessible under a current

a current condition, and then we are developing a reference condition to say under an improved accessibility scenario, this is how many more jobs people could access.

And so we're doing that for several different modes of transportation.

So I can walk through this in more detail if you need it, but I'm trying to keep those pretty high level for this discussion.

But I think this chart will provide a summary.

So basically what we're measuring right now is I'm going to use the bikes because I think that's a little bit easier to conceptualize.

under a bicycle level of travel stress of one network, which means these are very low stress, these are really low stress bicycle pathways.

Basically, you would be comfortable taking your small children and riding down like a shared use path or something like that, completely separated from the road, not a lot of traffic, things like that.

that's level of travel stress one and then the reference condition is level of travel stress four, meaning I am a very competent bicycle rider and I am competent riding with traffic that is going quickly and I don't mind if I'm riding right next to cars.

So what this is measuring is within a 20 minute travel period, currently I can access a certain number of jobs based on this low travel stress network.

Within 20 minutes, if I was able to ride on the highest stress travel network, I could reach an additional number of jobs.

And so we are measuring the difference between that high travel stress condition and that lowest travel stress condition to say this is the opportunity we have to improve accessibility.

And then we are also

this is using kind of standardized best sort of practice for what the appropriate travel time might be for each of these travel conditions or travel modes.

So for the automobile access for jobs, we are comparing how many jobs I can access now within 45 minutes under peak traffic conditions compared to how many I could access under off-peak travel conditions.

So those are the two reference measures.

For transit access, it's how many jobs can I access now within 45 minutes by transit compared to how many jobs could I be able to access if transit was just as efficient as vehicle travel during the same time period.

So if transit was just as efficient as vehicle travel,

I could access more jobs.

And this would give us sort of that reference condition.

And then we are doing a measure specifically for disadvantaged populations, which we're using the equity emphasis areas that were defined in V-Trans to capture that.

And we're looking at, again, we're using transit as the baseline for the potential for accessibility improvement for the disadvantaged populations, because that would give the greatest access to the greatest number of jobs.

So those are the measures.

Any questions on the measures here?

Yeah, no, we're not really talking about expanding the bus route.

We're talking about what are the system deficiencies?

How could we improve operations?

So maybe something like adding a shuttle or adding a bus travel lanes, you know, like something like that, that would improve the operations of transit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Any other questions?

Okay.

Yeah.

So this is one thing that I also want to clarify with this because I think this is a little bit confusing and probably stands a little bit more time.

The accessibility improvement may not, the need may show up, it's going to be based on where people are traveling from.

So people are traveling from a census block.

That's their home, that's like their home, that's their residential base, they're traveling from there.

And if there is a disruption on the network,

that prevents them from getting to a job along the network, the need is going to show up at the census block.

So what is being indicated on this need is where people are coming from.

That makes it difficult for where they're having trouble getting to a job.

But the improvement need may not be in the actual location where the need is is being identified.

So if you're traveling from this census block and this is where there's a job, you're traveling from this census block, there's a really nice shared use path and then it just stops and you have to ride along four lanes of traffic through a segment of it to get to your job.

The improvement is going to be where that disruption is, but the need is going to show up at the census block.

So there's going to have to be some context that we apply to understand what is contributing to those needs.

But it will help us understand where people are living, where they're having a hard time accessing jobs as a result of where they live.

So we have these four.

These are pretty similar for all of the performance measures.

So we can talk of these as a group, but we can either consider all segments, as far as the thresholds, all segments where the potential accessibility improvement is greater than zero.

So

kind of similar to the potential for safety improvement.

If there's an opportunity to improve accessibility, we want to make sure that that receives a score, or we could focus on just the top half of those accessibility needs.

I don't know, potentially, yeah.

So, I understand why.

This is just, you know, this one just blew my brain.

But I mean the gap, so it's a gap analysis.

So if I live in Woodbrooke and I work at Stonefield,

I can drive my car to work a lot faster than if I had to figure out the transit route from there to there.

So this would identify that, yeah, it takes you 75 minutes to do the bus and it takes you eight minutes at peak transportation time.

The need would show up in Woodbrooke.

The solution might show up somewhere along the path to Stonefield.

What did I miss?

And then if it's pedestrian, no, we did that one in a different area.

No, it includes, well, bicycle.

Yeah, I get it.

And then as it stacks on top of each other, which is what Sean just mentioned, it's basically like color commentary to all of the data.

All right, now is this a bike issue?

Is this a pedestrian issue?

especially, I mean, you know, I'm in the county, so transit in the county is very different than transit in the city, founded as a city.

So when you're comparing, I mean, the gap is going to be huge between job access, car versus transit in the county.

Maybe that way in the city, I just don't know well enough, but I mean, the route's running more frequently.

This too is looking at each particular modality.

It's saying the benchmark for the modality right now is X. How do we take it X minus some percentage?

It's focusing on each modality separately.

Correct?

This is where it is now, and this is the percentage.

This is the potential of P.A.I.

Yeah, so again, this is going to indicate needs for each of these, but we're going to be putting all of these together.

What this will do is it will help us understand when we get to the part where we're talking about what is the right solution to address those needs.

This will help give us that context to understand what is contributing to the need.

And I'll just run through a couple of maps.

And again, like Christine said, these are just demonstration data, but again, this probably isn't very surprising that, you know, you're going to see a lot more of these opportunities to improve accessibility in the urban core area.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the automobile access to jobs, that one is going to show up for the whole area.

So every everything is going to get a score for improved automobile access for jobs.

They just might be those scores.

And then this is just looking at the disadvantaged populations.

Again, I don't want to get into like these maps outputs because we haven't confirmed that this is actually what the data will look like.

It's using the same process that we're using before, but it's limiting the area, the geographic area that is being considered to that equity emphasis areas, which are identified through the statewide transportation plan, which is V-Trans.

Yeah.

All right, so the next one is related to congestion and travel time reliability.

I think this one is a little bit more straightforward.

We have a measure both for congestion, which is the travel time index.

This is basically saying how long does it typically take me to get to the place that I go to in the morning school or work or wherever it is that you're traveling in the morning under peak hour conditions compared to how long does it take me under free flow conditions.

And so that's your travel time index.

Your planning time index is a measure of the system reliability.

So the planning time index basically is a measure of how much variation is there in my travel time from one day to the next.

And they use this

95 percentile travel time which is basically I guess the layman's way to explain that is that if I need to be on work on time to my job or to school or wherever it is I'm going 95% of the time in addition to my normal travel time with the expected delays I need to leave an additional buffer of a certain period of time

to account for variability in the road conditions.

So that's the reliability.

If something is congested every morning and it always takes an extra 10 minutes to get through a segment at 8 o'clock versus at 10 o'clock, it's going to have a low planning time index, even though it might have a high travel time index.

So, is this one in the growth area only, or are you going to be taking into consideration commuters?

I mean, the idea thrown out there is whether it's an accident or it's just before it's an accident.

Yeah.

Yeah, it includes, it's a statewide analysis, so it includes consideration for those in this analysis, but they're not actually being indicated in the maps.

And I know that these are not incredibly easy to read.

These are maps that are taken from V-TRAN, so I couldn't do a whole lot to make them a little bit more visible, though, without downloading the data, and I am not the GIS technical person in our office here.

So the two thresholds that were being considered here, we're either using this lower threshold of a TTI, a travel time index or planning time index of greater than 1.3, which basically means under congestion conditions, it takes me 30% longer to get to where I need to go or 50% longer to get where I need to go than compared to free flow conditions.

Or if we're talking about planning time, I need to leave an additional 30% of my travel time in order to get

from one location.

So that's kind of how you can interpret it.

So we can either, again, focus on sort of any congestion concern that we might have in our transportation system right now, or we could focus on the most severe congestion and reliability concerns.

And so the difference in the outputs, if we look at these, these are taken from V-Trans, is let's see, the green lines are the planning time index,

and the red are the travel time index.

And you can see that there are more corridors and segments that will light up under the lower threshold.

MPO Tech recommended using the higher threshold.

So if we're talking about congestion, we really only want this to be considered a need if we're talking about really, really serious congestion issues.

And then for the, because we also want to make sure that we're considering all the modes of transportation, we are also looking at how could we measure the reliability concerns or related to the operation of the bus system.

And so we're also looking at bus on time performance as our measure for that.

So this is basically measuring how well vehicles adhere to the published schedule.

So again, we're not focusing necessarily on deficiencies related to the operation of the buses, but really we want to use this as an indicator for where we can improve the transportation infrastructure to better support on-site performance.

So the two measures or the two thresholds that were identified by the consultants were either to use the on-time performance for the bus system for any routes or time stops that are less than the system average from the previous year or to use the on-time performance need where

basically that there's consistently not meeting the established transit performance goal of 90% at those specific time stops where they're measuring this.

And the recommendation both from the city and MPO Tech was to use the system average.

And I don't know if you want to say any more about that.

So on-time performance is typically based on when

So if we wanted the second one, software

So, we have some fixes we need to do behind the scenes that are packed to make their line of performance.

Okay?

Is this a federal standard?

What is that?

For a lifetime.

Of the way it's measured?

Oh, so if you're early at all

Are we good with that?

Okay.

And then again, this just shows what the outputs would look like.

And yeah, you can see based on using that on-time performance threshold, the highest need would be indicated in the downtown area along the trolley.

All right.

So this is probably the last one that will take significant explanation.

But the last thing that we're measuring is this land use score.

And so the data that is being used for this is also available through V-Trans, which is the statewide transportation plan.

And they use this proprietary score called WOC score.

There's WOC score, transit score, bike score.

And basically, this is a measure of a combination of different things, but it's meant to indicate where are the conditions really good for there to be a lot of places where people can walk to or take transit to.

or Bike 2 without relying on a single occupancy vehicle travel or trip.

And so this is basically indicating where there's high intersection density, where there are a lot of different types of

I'm going to use activity centers.

I don't mean it as like an officially designated activity centers by activity generators.

So things like schools and parks and grocery stores, restaurants, things like that where people where people could walk.

And so in this case, we are actually looking at if there is a high walk score for an area, we're going to make that a higher need because that means that there are more destinations where people can already access to.

And so if we want to support transportation efficient land use,

and support the goals in the comprehensive planning processes that you all are identifying and supporting the walkability of your development areas.

We want to prioritize places where people could

access more destinations through non-vehicular movements.

And so this is the data set.

This is how they describe the different scores for walkability.

I didn't make that up.

And then this prioritization will also factor in our future growth projections.

And so this again is just downloaded from B-TRANS that shows where the areas would get the different walk scores.

You can see that it's largely in the urban core that's going to have the higher walk score, but then also along the 29 corridor and then out in Frisé as well.

And the somewhat walkable, it has a walk score of 50 or greater.

And so the two thresholds is that we could either look at the walk scores just in the development area, so that'd be the city of Charlottesville and the Albemarle County defined growth areas based on your comprehensive planning, or we could look at all segments within the MPO with a walk score that's greater than 40, 49 or greater than 50.

County.

And so again, this would prioritize the areas that the places that are already in the development areas would have a higher walk score regardless.

But then if there's any segment that's somewhat walkable that would outside of the development areas and the second threshold, those would also be captured here, which may relate.

I'm not sure you that Albemarle County folks would have to tell me if there are any like crossroad communities that might be captured here that are outside of the development areas.

It is, but if you look at this map, I'm not sure if the somewhat walkable areas are capturing

anything that goes beyond the current development areas.

Well, it would make sense for an Albemarle where our growth area comes right up and smack dab to a rural area where all those lines are, where you're on one side of the street of Rio Road, you are in the development area and the other side of the street, which also the sidewalk is the rural area.

I like some of these segments over here.

You know, so it would be areas that are, if you were standing there, you'd be like, oh, it's the growth area.

You'd be wrong.

That's good.

And in walkable places where you would want the information from.

Right.

Okay.

All right.

So, and again, we'll run that we'll run that analysis and we'll do this for disadvantaged populations as well.

And then the last one, there really isn't a threshold, but just so you all are aware, we will basically we're going to do this analysis on the other data points.

And then we will go back at the end to determine where there are some of these environmental measures that we want to consider as well.

And then there will be sort of an adjustment that is applied to the score that it gets in all these other areas based on

these environmental factors.

So that's going to include exposure to inland flooding or areas that are basically susceptible to a flood risk, as well as giving additional points to segments that are in distressed communities.

And so these were just the adjustments.

We could certainly look at reviewing whether or not these are the adjustments that we would want to make.

But basically all segments that have this historic flooding exposure would get an additional adjustment to further elevate that need.

And then there would be further adjustments for economically distressed communities at different tiers.

So these would be applied, these wouldn't be sort of scores that were given to determine the needs.

Yep.

So that is it.

No, I think that gives us guidance for how to run the analysis.

OK, I think the next item may give you some feedback.

Smart scale search engineering.

Yeah, so you may recall that I had sent you all a summary of the proposed changes and just presented an opportunity to collect feedback from all of the MPO committees.

So nice of it to start where I left off.

So I just want to review that as well as there were some questions that came up about what some of the implications of some of the changes might be.

And so I did a little bit of a review.

What I want to say, just to caveat all of this, is that this is based on my analysis and that the CTB requested that the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff prepared a summary of scenarios

per construction district that will be presented at an upcoming meeting.

So obviously if there are discrepancies, defer to what their scenarios would indicate.

So the first question that I wanted to answer is as far as reducing or limiting the number of or the types of applications that the MPO would be eligible to submit based on the new

definition that has been proposed, how many of our projects from the previous rounds would have met that definition.

So for comparison, the MPO and the TJPDC submitted a total of 28 project applications between rounds one and five of SmartScale, so we submitted 28.

And these are the projects, so there are six of them that I'm confident of would meet that new definition and two that I'm uncertain about but might meet that new definition.

So on a total of six, maybe eight of those projects would have been eligible for under this new change in definitions for what types of projects would be able to be funded through the high priority program.

So what I will say is that all of

None?

None.

Yeah, so the other thing that I'll just... Well, it says among the projects we were putting in identifying when we're going to BP, but it does also say there were going to be several projects that we applied for that would no longer qualify as this.

I guess, go to...

Yeah, I'm wondering about it.

So this is a retrospective analysis.

When does it need to go forward?

It's a little slim to know that.

They haven't even discussed criteria, what, four and five.

That's coming in September.

So until we know what they finalize on the weighting and the categories, it's a little assumed.

I mean, this is good to start getting our heads wrapped around this so that we understand.

But just purely looking back and going, well, this is not going to change things.

Well, it doesn't really matter because as Sean elegantly put it, we're going to learn how to play the new game, but the rules haven't been set for the new game yet.

Then we'll be able to start making some judgments about it.

The one thing I would say that I think is important for us all to realize is that, you know, for example, what's not on here is the hydraulic package that originally got funded or that finally got funded.

So what this means is that the MPO is absolutely the right entity to submit the full grade separated interchange improvements package that we originally wanted.

and some of the other changes that are being discussed related to SmartScale, I think are intended, correct me if I'm wrong, are intended to make those projects more competitive and to provide more pathways through those types of projects being funded.

But if we are not able to successfully implement a project like that because it still is not competitive, what that means is that there would be more, the responsibility for finding an alternative that doesn't meet that criteria would fall more on the localities.

Went.

So all the different segments pop right seamlessly.

We were told that was too expensive and start again.

But now I get a sense that we're looking more favorably on things that will actually be just that, to be bigger and require that unfortunate amount of you've got staff time to get it there and then hopefully really solve the whole question.

So I also ran a couple of scenarios using the updated scoring methodology.

So I also want to just provide the caveat that obviously, as all of the program changes are being implemented, we probably would not have submitted the same slate of projects previously that we submitted this time.

So again, this is

meant to give you an indication of what you might see as far as changes.

So under the new scoring methodology that has been proposed, which is basically removing the land use score as a standalone scoring outcome and using that as a multiplier, you'll see that

Overall, I think the expectation is that project scores overall are going to generally trend downward.

But remember, SmartScale is all about comparison one project against other projects.

So if everything is generally trending downward overall or on average, it's not necessarily going to be something that hurts us.

But where you'll see the biggest reductions in

like changes in the scoring outcomes is these projects, mostly small bicycle and pedestrian projects that were given in a large portion of their scores from the land use score.

And so this is showing what the overall scoring outcome difference is for the projects that were submitted within the MPA region.

And then again, the caveat is that this was my analysis and I did not validate this anywhere, but what that would look like is that if we submitted the same slate of projects,

under the proposed revisions, the only project that I believe would have been funded would have been the U.S.

250 Peter Jefferson Parkway, which, as you recall, was later substituted out.

So the asterisks indicate that these were the projects that were funded that actually were recommended for funding in around five.

Yeah.

So what wouldn't have been funded would have been the Avon Street multi-modal project and the Belvedere project.

And again, I don't know the ins and outs of funding and I know there's the 12% contingency that was set aside, but basically there was $121.6 million to allocate.

So this represents $118 million of funding in the district grant program and the Belvedere project was the next project.

And so

depending on how strictly that 12% contingency had to be adhered to potentially Belvedere could have been funded, but I don't know the ins and outs of that.

Yeah.

So, just wanted to show again, though, I think probably what's important to remember is that as the program requirements change,

So the other conversation is in September with CTV.

Yes.

And that's what do we have an eight for that specific day by chance?

And is that the final conversation or is that like a work session like the previous few

with final determination is to come later.

I believe it's only 19.5.

So that's the next work session.

All in recommendations have been indicated would be shared at the October meeting.

Yeah.

So I just want to briefly, I sent this to you ahead of time, I just wanted to briefly go through the comments that we received regarding the proposed changes.

So basically, related to the recommendation that we reduce the application cap from four applications to two applications, the comment received was basically, have we been performing as a region?

And, you know, maybe this is reasonable, but if we're performing pretty well as a region,

we might prefer more applications versus less applications.

I think for the most part, we're performing pretty well.

There have been a couple of projects this most recent round where we didn't have the final cost estimates completed.

I don't know, Mike, you'll have to refresh my memory.

I think we had all the design plans and the schematics.

I think we were waiting on cost estimates and the economic development site validation after the submission deadline.

Sure.

So there were some outstanding items during this last round of SmartScale.

and we're able to do a lot more.

We're out there helping localities get their stuff done.

So it is a lot of work.

Everything stops when the time is up.

Agreed.

And then the MPO and the PDs, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

So that would be two small and five, four large leachable armors.

It would be still 30 or so, 30 some.

There's really not many that came in that are actually leachable armors.

Oh, I might have been answering the wrong question on that one, but we just had a great conversation about that application readiness.

So this is about the changes to the application, like our completeness at the time of submission.

So basically it sounds like we're probably okay with this recommendation because overall we're generally performing pretty well as far as making, like working to make sure we're getting all our materials on time.

This next discussion was about the project delivery and performance.

This was addressing the proposed change that consensus funding decisions would potentially be tied to entity performance and project delivery.

We did have some comments about how this might make sense as far as ensuring that

You know that the funding is being spent efficiently and ensuring that there is appropriate project delivery.

camp.

So related to the future congestion conditions, so this is regarding the proposed revision to use a 10-year future growth conditions to determine congestion benefit scores.

And it's been done more than a week.

But am I right in understanding that this particular change would allow much more for lack of planning and building, which is certainly one of the reasons for what I see, because today we've been trying to fix it.

And then as far as the reduction or the defining what types of projects would be eligible for through the high priority program and defining those based on meeting these criteria, new capacity highway managed lanes, newer improved interchanges,

than the rail and fixed guideway transit improvements.

I received a couple of comments on this one.

I think bike pet projects should also be considered.

It seems like they could figure out a way to include them in the process.

And then there's also just this general concern that it seems like the smart scale projects, if this is implemented, will be driven towards larger projects for motorized modes only, which will leave some smaller regions that don't have light rail and rail services.

I'm just willing to talk about our planner meeting weeks back.

The only thing I would point out to this is that I think a lot of the bike ped projects that we submitted as the MPO have been multi-jurisdictional projects.

So I think that could be an additional challenge because the MPO would no longer be able to apply for those multi-jurisdictional bike ped projects that we have been the applicants for previously.

So this next recommendation was about basically the funding sets in the high priority program.

So what happens right now is that everything is categorized into construction districts and then the district grant program funding is allocated first.

whatever the lowest scoring funded project is and the district grant program sets the threshold for the high priority program eligible projects that would receive funding in step two.

So if a high priority program scores above the lowest scoring district grant program project,

and the cost doesn't exceed the total amount that was allocated for that district grant program.

Those are funded in step two, and then step three allocates the high priority program funding on a statewide basis.

I think, again, those of you who are experts in there, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think step two was intended to give some sort of reasonable assurance that each district

would receive some of this high priority program funding.

But what happens is that since the lowest scoring funded project in each construction district is based on its performance against other projects in that construction district,

There's a lack of parity between projects that might be funded in construction districts where the average project costs or the average project scores overall lower compared to other districts.

So if you're in a district where your highest scoring funded or your lowest scoring funded project is like a 2.3 and you're in a district where your lowest scoring district grant program is like a 9.7, that sets the threshold for who's going to get high priority program funding.

So high priority program funding is being allocated

to lower scoring projects based on which district those projects are located in.

So this step would remove that step too, and you would go immediately from allocating funding within the construction district to allocating funding based on the statewide prioritization process.

This doesn't seem like it would necessarily impact our region or the outcomes of our region, but if you're in a low-scoring construction district, that might have impacts on your likelihood that you would receive high-priority program funding.

And then we talked about the changes to the land use score, moving that from being a standalone scoring criteria to a multiplier.

The comments we received is that this could make sense, but it depends on how it's weighted and so there are a lot of factors that make it difficult to

to really determine whether or not this feels appropriate or not.

The discussion we had in the MPO technical committee meeting is that the land use score can often act like a proxy for latent demand or other scores that aren't being captured through the other criteria.

So for example, if it's a new multimodal project, there might not be a safety score, even though it would seem intuitive that there might be safety benefits that would be associated with a new pedestrian.

infrastructure throughout the region.

So the concern is that like this land use score was kind of capturing some of that latent demand that wouldn't be captured through the scoring criteria that is established related to safety, accessibility, economic development, et cetera.

as far as doing one of the things or you know that if you saw how we saw that the resolution needed the rest of the language.

I think if I'm reading this correctly, without the names for Avon, the problems I had scored, well, over that period.

So the locality of Philadelphia, but the score would have still been the same if anyone, the rest of the fathers within that cohort of fathers and that family would have been doing much better

Right, I understand that, but there's also a photo of a kid with a feather in his booty, right?

It's covered, I'm not sure.

But for us, it's part of the relationship.

I mean, it's not that I got to put that away, but I'll just start it.

And then this was related to if the land use score is no longer a standalone score, those points would have to be reallocated to other scoring criteria.

And so the recommendation for our area type B is that half of the land use score, so an additional 5%, be added each to safety and congestion.

And I did not receive any comments on that.

Yeah, that's basically you get points taken away if it's going to impact like have an environmental impact on like like a wetland area or

The language score really is based on where the positive is.

So you've got problems that are being funded solely just because of where it's at.

And they're providing limited benefits to safety.

congestion or accessibility.

So when you have projects that are funded on a majority of land use, I think that's that's a problem.

I mean, what I'm seeing here around five, a majority of applications are getting their funding solely on land use.

So that goes back to the discussion we were having last time about what would happen with that land use score.

So right now, basically the way the land

right now land use has given its own value.

So what happens is that with each of these scores, they are basically normalized against the highest scoring project in that category.

So the project that gets the highest land use benefit score under this scenario would basically have a multiplier of two, meaning that the benefits that it would receive and all of the other categories would be doubled.

And every project after that would get something less than two.

And then just the final comment.

So this shows sort of the difference in the scenario if all of their changes were implemented on the statewide outcomes.

I think there is just general concern about the reduction in the overall number of bicycle and pedestrian projects from 51 to 13, whereas the number of highway projects only seemed to increase by one.

Of course, the scale of the projects also increased.

So even though this is only showing an increase of one highway project, it's also showing that more expensive or bigger projects are being funded through this.

But the general feedback is that

you know, there was concern about this reduction in bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that would be funded through this program, considering that it seems like this is what a lot of the public feedback we're getting is in support of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

Well, it was an opportunity to but really, really, I wanted to just give you all an opportunity to sort of reflect on this to provide to provide feedback and then to, you know, if there's anything either in support or concerns that you have, this would be an opportunity for us to coordinate a response if that is something that you would like to express to the to the criminal transportation board, but we have we have Mr. Byers right here.

is a corrective to perceptions that perhaps smaller projects are being done versus more substantial bigger projects.

Is that case showing?

Is it trying to get a little more area, a little more of a bump

Yeah, my guess is that three years ago I would be having the same conversation about the next.

So it's an iterative kind of thing.

So, I don't know, I don't see if it's far away, but I'm very close to leaving this.

I don't think there's anything that the American program needs to be said about it.

Yeah, I guess we all know that at the end of the table, we're moving to the end of the table.

I like the way you bring them both.

I think the land use man heard comments that I think that's an area that needs to be fixed.

On the department side, with the amount of money that's coming into transportation right now and how the market has been flooded with projects, we have to figure out a way to scale back on the amount of projects that we're looking at so we can keep delivering.

I mean, it makes no sense of submitting 60 projects and only 20 or 30 that want to get funded.

I'd like to point out, I'm trying to do more of an early interview with the state definition, because how is that going to be funded?

That's a good question.

Well, locality is a good thing.

I mean, locality means more.

I mean, we've got vocality is better than that.

We worked with Baltimore County just yesterday regarding the projects that they're looking at for revenue sharing.

We hired a consultant to go out and do some work to stand out from the beginning of the project today.

I guess it forces localities to put more scale in the game than they do.

because you gotta realize when you get funds for these projects, your estimate is not good enough.

Your budget's set.

And going for the cap and buyers and CTV to ask for more money because a project is stalled or you lost an estimate.

It's not a fun thing to do.

It's pretty good.

Yeah.

Ned or anyone else?

I think something has to be done in order to give the department a chance to manage the escalation cost because I have had scars on my back from a project that I worked on for 15 years just now.

It wasn't the lack of designing, trying, whatever.

That has happened in the last three years, and so I think there's probably a lot of people across the continent that are just concerned about the rights of the business class.

But I've seen lots of modifications that have gone a long way in the past.

I mean, there's multiple tools.

There will remain multiple tools to get local projects or all of our projects done.

So, you know, this is just one part of it.

So we have to understand how to most effectively use this part.

And then just like we've done to understand and use the other ones as effectively as we can as well.

Yep, the only real update I have is just a reminder of the joint meeting with the state of Augusta-Wainsboro MPO next month.

That will be in the morning.

We will not have our regular meeting in the afternoon on that day.

You should have received an invitation that would have looked like it came from Christine.

If you did not receive that, check your spam folder because that's where my invitation went.

Kristine did not actually send them out though.

So be sure to check those.

Next order of business, relatable updates.

We've got the public hearing scheduled for the Albemarle local 2B that will be on September 19th.

The 2B will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

The National Guard will be on September 19th.

some time ago.

So we're working to see if there are any other feasible alternatives.

We hope to have some concepts by November.

We'd like that and bring something back to this board.

Once we get feedback on stakeholders and whether or not they feel alternative or limited, or do we want to continue moving forward with the front end project.

Right now, we weren't planning to go to a public hearing until the fall of the 20th Wal-Mart project.

As of right now, we're kind of hitting the brakes.

I'm not prepared to say at this point.

Well, I think there's just some concern over the design.

Okay.

Yes, just concerned about the design of the project.

That's been critical.

Yes, good evening.

I have a very brief update for the board tonight.

Just noting that we held on last Friday, August 11, I believe, if I keep track of time, we held our post-award workshop for all of our grantees that were any recipient of any of our state program funding.

A recording of that as well as a copy of the presentation can be found on the DRPT website.

and we also, I'll provide my agency update copy to the staff.

Great, thank you so much.

So, I guess we're going to update on our revenue sharing projects that we are looking at to apply for this year.

He said initially five

five projects in the re-application period.

Recently, we had a discussion with the board about removing a couple of those.

The three that we are definitely moving forward with are continuing projects previously received revenue sharing, including Commonwealth Drive and the Baby Drive sidewalks, just all hydraulic near

So, you know, in the Burkhart Drive shared-use path would be the extension of the existing Burkhart shared-use path that runs from Holley Meade south just across the river.

We want to extend that all the way down to Woodbrook.

And then the final project that we're going to move forward with is the Burkhart Drive extension to Airport Road.

This is just north of Holley Meade where it currently stubs out.

You want to push that through to Airport Road where it would then

The two that we are looking to not move forward with, because we want to develop them further before moving forward include the Eastern Avenue South extensions of Project Afrozé to connect from the central neighborhoods down to 250 with a bridge over the river out there, the creek out there, and so that still needs some work to

and then also a project to sort of reshape Landsland, I'm not sure if it's better, but our schools did Landsland campus, that's where Albemarle baseball is, as well as an elementary and a number of other schools that are elementary and middle schools out there.

We have a master plan to sort of reshape that that includes

Also, just so I'm aware, the Three Notch Trail project, which received a federal grant for planning this year, we have been developing that with the FHWA to try and get our project agreements.

We've been told that it looks like the project agreements are ready to be signed.

and we resubmitted our Reconnecting Communities grant, which was a grant project that we essentially from around just north of Cairo in the afternoon, all the way up to Rivanna River, following 29 and trying to look at how we can better connect the communities on both sides of that.

It was not funded, but we were told by IHWA that it was a very strong

We had some discussions with the City of Charlottesville about partnering up on that.

We had a lot of painting.

We got our take off the school program which switched from being more programmatic last year to being more about infrastructure.

Last year we did about 80 to 90 projects or mostly paint ballers on the ground.

This year we're looking to do about 145.

We're working in public works to get those out on the ground.

There are a few more concrete projects involved with that list this year.

Some of the paint that we put on the ground is paint last year.

In the spring, we're going to be looking to put permanent concrete.

The other main job that we're doing right now is document building hubs.

So making sure our squeakers aren't parked all over the side walls on West Main.

So both of those should be

and the Alternative Pools Study.

Both of those, the Alternative Pools Study had gone through the technical analysis and developing an extracurricular engagement phase, and the CAT TSP has finished its initial development outreach around goals and objectives, and we're going through a technical analysis of the development methods right now, and we'll be coming back to the public for more engagement on potential improvements to the task list we can apply.

I'm great.

Sorry.

Couldn't join you guys today.

Got a spot on our plate right now.

So just want to bring update.

We have received six new large buses, 535 footers and 130 footer, which is going to help our reliability.

These buses were ordered 22 months ago.

So we have them now we need to get them painted.

We just got the plates.

We got to get radios and all of the add ons to make it.

So we put them in service and we actually have one VOC that arrived about two weeks ago.

We're still waiting on four more that were ordered 19 months ago.

So they're starting to trickle in.

Couple of projects, and I think it was local last time, just to make sure we're doing our own microtransit operations and analysis and figuring out how to get a greater amount of service.

I think we're making it a central part of our services.

We'll be getting our gas study tomorrow.

We'll have a real trend in the needs assessment where we can take the loss at the end of the club.

And we'll also be looking at implementing a

fossil electric vehicle implementation study, and we're also a partner in renewable energy and building some fast charge stations in rural areas.

Like on the rural us in San Diego, they were on a singular charge, so we would have a fast charging station with strategic elements.

You know, those charging stations would also be available for public use as well.

So that's where we're at.

Thank you very much.

and we will be receiving our first battery card bus this fall from what Garland's been, wow, I was here for a few months.

So big difference, but we'll be receiving four this fall.

We put in the infrastructure, the parking and transportation to have dual maintenance

still powering for both gas-powered vessels and battery-powered vessels and will continue converting that fleet further to mine.

And then the last thing I was going to mention is that for those of you who know about why it should be tired from EVA, so Scott's sales store is telling everybody, if you leave, he's going to ask for a replacement and he started off August 9th, so he'll start paying

you know, merging out into the community was against his faith under him.

And I'm working with, as I always do, with the community to keep things coordinated.

For instance, for things that Becca and I used to coordinate on regularly, probably engaging in stocks to make sure that we're kind of sharing responsibilities.

My assumption is that he'll continue with the RTP, but I'll check in with him on all these things to make sure that we're not limited.

Great, thank you very much.

They're not working.

Okay.

FTA, or Transit Association?

Administration.

Okay.

Who really got that?

Thanks, Lee, for being on.

It's good to see you.

and the TJPBC.

Yeah, and I will try, I do have slides, but I'll try to be brief.

This is largely informational, but if you have feedback or guidance you want to provide as we have these conversations, I'm certainly happy to take your feedback.

So basically, the funding that our MPO receives in order to do our regional planning work is based on a formula that VDOT reviews every 10 years based on the updates to the census and the redefinition and the population of the new urban areas that are identified.

and so this afternoon I'm going to talk about specifically the PL funding which comes from the VDOT or the Federal Highway side but DRPT follows the same formula so whatever VDOT ends up doing is going to also dictate our funding from DRPT as well.

So in Virginia, the amount of funding that MPOs receive, remember every year we go through and we approve our unified planning work program and we say this is how much money we get, this formula is what tells us how much money we have to do that planning work.

So because we completed the 2020 census and because the census updated the urban areas, we're reconsidering the formula at this point.

So the current formula, our current budget in FY24 was about $257,000.

And the formula is based on a base funding amount of $50,000.

And then every MPO in the state gets that same base funding allocation regardless of how big they are.

And the rest of the funding is allocated based on their population.

And so our current funding is

50,000 in our base funding, 156,000 in our population-based allocation, and then there's a state and local match contribution.

That's the current way it's done.

So a couple things that I just want you to know is that the census changed the way they designated urban areas in 2020 compared to 2010.

And the MPO boundary is not the same as the urban area boundary, but the urban area boundary does inform the MPO boundary.

And so these changes aren't necessarily affecting our MPO boundary, but they are affecting the population that is used to determine how much funding our MPO will receive.

So the changes were that they changed from a minimum threshold of 2,500 people as far as the density requirement to constitute in urban areas to basically increase the threshold.

So instead of 2,500 people being the threshold to establish an urban area, it now has to have a density of 2,000 households or 5,000 people.

So there's a higher threshold.

and then there's also this requirement that they talk about hops and jumps and that's if you have several clusters of urban areas that are within certain distances of each other they're allowed to contribute to the geographic boundary of the urban areas and so the maximum distance

that these clusters could be together in order to contribute to the population of the urban area was decreased in 2020.

So what that meant is that if you have a cluster that was two miles away from your main dense area, that would have qualified as the urban area in 2010, but it does not qualify in 2020.

And then this just shows right here.

This is the 2010 urbanized area.

The yellow part represents the areas that qualified as urbanized areas and then the red is the MPO boundary.

So the MPO boundary is based on the urbanized area, but they're not the same thing.

So this shows sort of the changes that occurred between 2010 and 2020 for the Charlottesville area.

So you'll see that there is this portion up here in southern Greene County that was considered urbanized in 2010.

That area is no longer considered urban, but it wasn't part of our MPO boundary anyway, so that doesn't really have an impact.

These red areas, though, were considered part of our urban area in 2010, and they no longer qualify as being part of our urbanized area in 2020 because of that top jump threshold increase.

And then the last thing I want to point out is that Crozet

was it got upgraded.

It was an urbanized cluster in 2010 and 2020.

They didn't distinguish between urbanized clusters and urbanized areas.

So Crozet is its own urban area now.

But Crozet, even though it is within the MPO boundary, the population of this area within Crozet does not count towards our population for the urban area.

Because it's its own urban area.

and it has never counted.

Yeah, it's because it's because it's because it exceeds that maximum hop jump distance from the Charlottesville Albemarle urbanized area.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, so the population of Crozet does not also does not count towards our population in these funding allocations.

All that said, that's just sort of to set the context.

What happened is that in some areas, fortunately, not Charlottesville, Albemarle, is because of these changes in the census designation for the urban areas, the geographic area shrunk and in some cases led to a reduction on the overall population.

And so when we're talking about this population allocations or the funding that's being allocated based on the population, some areas are actually seeing reduced population, largely because of the adjustments in the urban area definition.

And so if we use the same funding allocation that we were using in 2010, applying that to the updated population numbers, there are a lot of regions that would see a decline in their funding.

So basically the formula is under consideration right now.

There are two parts to this discussion.

One of them is a review of whether or not $50,000 is the right base allocation for MPOs.

So the consideration with VDOT is, you know, do we potentially increase that to $75,000 or $100,000?

And then there's also a discussion about the population-based allocations.

and whether or not we want to just use the 2020 census populations in their urban areas as the population for those allocations or to use a mixture of the 2010 and 2020 census populations, which would stabilize the change in funding a little bit for regions that are seeing a more significant change in their populations between census years.

So we are participating in this discussion.

This is happening.

VDOT is developing the updated funding allocation in conference with MPOs.

So they're reaching out to MPOs.

I'm reaching out to you all to let you know that this is happening.

And you can give me guidance if you have any positions that you want us to move forward with in our discussions.

What I want to emphasize is that our region, despite those changes in the urban area geographic boundaries, will maintain level funding and see an increase regardless of the funding allocation formula that is used.

We're in a very fortunate position that way.

But based on those discussions, the lowest funding allocation our MPO would receive would occur under the formula that had the $50,000 base and a combination of the 2010-2020 census populations.

That would approximately be around what we're getting right now.

And then the highest funding allocation to our region would occur with $100,000 base and then using the 2020 census population, which would increase our budget, again, just on the

Sure.

It kind of was the goal because I think one of the concerns was that it was contributing to this like land grab mentality where people wanted to keep adding further and further urbanized areas into their sort of like density area and so I think that was one of the major concerns that they were trying to

address.

But I mean, that all happened at the state level.

What I will say is this is kind of in some respects a zero sum game.

So if we get a higher allocation, that means somebody else is getting a lower allocation.

So we are participating with the Virginia Association of MPOs, who's working to try to build some consensus around this.

But VDOT has had an initial meeting just to explain the different funding formula decisions, and then they will be scheduling a meeting with us in September.

Go back to one slide.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe just to sort of pick the middle way of this area, if it's $75,000 a day, it's a combination of two popular issues, as soon as I think we need the middle.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it is kind of.

What seems reasonable is it means that you fix with 50 and 175 at your base.

Take kind of a moderated approach to it.

Yeah, this is really mostly intended for informational purposes.

All right.

Any additional matter, shall we go?

Person?

Online?

Okay.

Do we need a motion to close the meeting?

Okay.

Motion to adjourn.

All in favor?