MPO Technical Committee Meeting   9/20/2022

You guys are back.

Let's start with attendance.

I guess that's how we do it when we don't have the Zoom roster up there.

If you look at the minutes, they have all the non-voting voting staff.

He is being replaced by Jason.

Wood Hudson, Sarah Pennington, Richard Duran, Michael Barnes, Sandy Shackelford, Lucinda Shannon, Gretchen Thomas, Ruth Emerick, Tony Cho, Donna Chen,

Alright, let's go to matters from the public.

All right, I will entertain a motion.

Do we have a second?

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Michael Barnes.

All opposed?

All right, the motion passes unanimously.

Next up, National Public.

I'm Michelle here.

All right.

Next up then, General Administration.

Acceptance of the agenda.

Do we have any modifications to make today?

I was just pointing out that we did not have a forum last time, so we did not approve

So it looks like you've got the July 26th.

Are they official minutes?

Well, yeah, so basically the minutes from July will be brought to you at your next meeting.

Yeah, technically they were supposed to be.

All right.

Well, technically, we had a forum.

Mr. Lee attended.

So we actually had a forum.

But the forum was present with Mr. Lee and the team.

All right, so the consent agenda with district alignment.

All right, Stephen moves.

Do we have a second?

All right, let's get on to elections of the technical committee chair and vice chair for fiscal year 2023.

No one else, Jeff?

Thanks.

I feel like it's gone back and forth between Rory and I since I started six years ago.

I don't think it's in the bylaws, but that's traditionally what we've done.

And Rory, have you been in for two years now?

Seems right.

I was in person when I got appointed by Julian.

Um, yeah, so I think this would be your second, you're in your second year now.

Okay.

Like the maximum?

Well, I'll set the nomination, so on.

Mr. Alex McAfee, Mr. James Cruz, Mr. Ned Johnson, Mr. Roy Stolzenberg, Mr. Kevin McDermott, Ms. Jessica Hersh-Balling,

I suppose I will serve as your loyal chair again.

Or can I ask Luis, would you be interested in vice chair?

You know, this is my first round in here.

I would not feel comfortable doing that.

No worries.

Thought I'd check with you.

I don't think that would be a little sad.

You can keep the fighting mission theme going.

But I'm just going to check and step out of there.

I'll move that we nominate Kevin.

I second.

All right, hearing none, I'll pick a couple more.

Mr. James Greens.

Aye.

Ms. Jeanette Janssen.

Aye.

Mr. Roy Stolzenberg.

Aye.

Mr. Kevin Young.

Aye.

Ms. Christine Jacobs.

Yes.

Mr. Susan Johnson.

Aye.

Mr. Wood Hudson.

Aye.

Aye.

Mr. Michael Barnes.

So I just wanted to go through a couple of these are pretty small revisions to the UPWP.

But we still need to vote on it because it requires some movement.

So there are two, there are really three things that happened.

One of them is pretty minor regarding what the actual total amounts are to the programming.

But the two things that happened is that we have some real liver funding for FY23 that we had originally thought was going to be a little bit higher.

This 25,488 that's being shown on the chart right here, we had

estimated was going to be $26,667 something along that line.

What ended up happening is that with the FTA portion of the funding,

We're not actually rolling money over into a new contract from FY22 into FY23.

We're actually continuing the existing contract.

So we spent just a little bit more in FY22 that we were able to go ahead and bill to the FTA-MPO funding.

And so we revised that amount to reflect what we actually have left from the FY22 FTA funding to roll over into FY23.

The other thing that happened with the FTA money is we had originally programmed all of this FY22 rollover to that $25,488 that you see there.

We had originally put all of that into Task 2 to be a match for the government study.

And basically, what Kim explained to us, if you want better information, I think that because of the way that we were granted funding for the government study,

We did not have to pull that out separately in the FY22 contract, so we're able to basically program the MPO support towards the government setting into our regular UPWP and we don't have to show that allotment separately for the purposes of matching.

And so DRPT's preference as well as FTE's preference is for us to go ahead and spend down the entirety of our FY22 contract before we start billing to FY23.

So what we did was we took this rollover amount of $25,488 and we redistributed it among the entire UPWP so that we can build all of our programming to that FY22 amount that's left in the FY22 contract first.

I don't know what happened in your actual document.

I got something really weird with those numbers.

So this table in the draft UPWP that you received is actually not correct,

It has been corrected on this, though.

So I realized that last night.

I want to make sure that we point it out.

But the totals didn't change other than the reduction in the total amount of $1,100 and something more based on the actual expenditures from FY22 that we have left.

So the other change is this additional $46,830 that you see on this chart right here under past two of the long-range transportation plan.

And what happened with that funding is that we received our cost allocations from VDOT for the purposes of planning our UPWP.

And then when the contract came in, they actually came in beyond what was initially allocated.

So we ended up having a contract that was $46,830 in excess of what we had based our UPWP on.

So we have to go ahead and program that

into our work plan.

And so what we did was we, yeah, so what we did was we put that entirety of the $46,830 into the on-call services.

I think there might be something a little bit off of those figures.

Oh, no, no.

We put it all into the on-call services, which is basically sort of our contingency fund for either programming that has not been identified yet or things that we want to, we just don't know what that programming is.

So we can either use it for technical assistance for on-call from the TJPDC and the MPO to provide services, or we can use it for programming that has yet to be identified, in which case we may need to come back into another revision.

But the total change of $46,830 is for task two,

And that's basically the combination of the $47,319 additional dollars from the FHWA side minus the $1,174 reduction from the FTA side.

So any questions on that?

We're basically asking you all to recommend the resolution of support for the adjustment from the funding to

Okay, I'll double check the numbers.

Thank you.

Aside from double checking the numbers, are there any other questions?

It says the appendix starts on page 230, suggesting we have over 200 pages left.

I think there's that.

I will update everything.

I will update that too.

I think it automatically corrects it, so I keep going back and re-correcting the same issues over and over.

Thank you.

I just said this last time we discussed the LEP, but it's got the goals in there.

There's no measures that are associated with any of these goals, and in the absence of those measures, it's hard to

We can have a broader discussion about the purpose of the UPWP and how they're used in NPOs, but one of the kind of standard things that happens is that when UPWP cells are intentionally a little bit less specific so that there is some flexibility for us to either not be so strictly

So, and those, I think, come from the Long-Range Transportation Plan.

So that is during that, which we're starting now, which would be the time to dig into that, I think.

It might be of some value since you have some new members joining the committee.

Are you looking for a recommendation on this resolution?

Any opposed?

Abstain.

I think that motion carries then.

yeah so um so you all have a scope of work in your um in your packets and we'll go through them in a little bit more detail what i want to emphasize just up front is that right now this is all 100 draft so i'm bringing this to you all today happy to receive comments and feedback and then um we'll really start in earnest kicking off our work on the long range transportation

So the first thing that we can just talk about is some of these general committee responsibilities for the people who are going to be involved.

This might be a little bright in here.

It might be a little bit hard to read the line background.

But I've funded this up into four categories, and I know there was some discussion a lot around about this MPA or TAC working group and whether that suffered.

But for the purposes of this, I'm just kind of referring to this as an enhanced MPA or TAC work group, which may include some other people.

So the MPO Policy Board will serve as the governing body of the steering committee.

They'll really set the direction and they'll ultimately adopt the non-range transportation plan.

CTAC, we really wanted to make sure that they were providing the oversight as far as our public engagement and reviewing the plan based on

citizen level responses to what the recommendations were coming from.

So we're hoping that CTAC will be able to help guide our public participation strategies, that they'll be just serve as conduits to the community as far as making sure there's awareness about this planning effort.

And then they'll also respond to their recommendations and they'll serve as an advisory committee to the NPO Policy Board.

You all are going to serve as advisors to the Policy Board and really got in the technical review of the plan, informing the feedback of the process and the content, also serving in your respective positions as coordinators with other planning efforts that are happening and the localities and the state and other agencies to make sure that we're considering things beyond just the transportation planning, but also how this

integrates with your comprehensive plans and housing plans and climate action goals and those kinds of things.

And so to further bolster specifically that last item about the coordination, that's really where the MPO tech work groups are going to come in.

So they're going to be able to serve as subject matter experts on some of these elements and really help us think beyond just our transportation planning

These are the options that are recommended.

Are these achieving actual goals for the communities or the priorities that have been identified?

Kind of serving as a way to ground truth, I guess, some of the recommendations that come out of it and help us to consider what the impacts of those are going to be.

I'm also hopeful that this group will help guide us to be able to identify the best ways

and that outreach and engagement into our community.

So those are the general committee responsibilities.

Where are we at with that now?

Then it's schedule-wide.

It will probably be meeting just in the off months from MPO Tech.

So MPO Tech will meet every other one of them in this tech work group, which will largely be UL and might include some other people sometimes.

Yep.

Any other questions?

Alright, so those of you who got your SMART SCALE know I love a good roadmap, so I'm using a different roadmap this time to summarize our long-range transportation plan.

So, you'll probably be seeing this on a lot and unless I get feedback that you don't think this one is a good thing to do.

So this should summarize the same items that are on the Gantt chart that I'll show you.

And I'll go through these topics a little bit separately, but this is really divided up into eight different components, which are largely going to sort of follow the outline of the plan chapters that will be created.

So we'll start with the demographic and land use trends, getting updated information from the census from the localities on land use.

We'll do an evaluation of the existing system operations.

So again, that's data

Gatherings and Collections, looking at the safety concerns, the operations, you know, maybe we'll look at some of the maintenance considerations and the system preservation things, so the things that have been identified as needing, as needing maintenance on the safety and good repair list or something like that.

and then we'll also be collecting all of the plans that are relevant to this to really create this planning context and background so we know how this transportation plan is fitting in with all of the other state and local and agency efforts that are happening.

So Ryan and I are going to start getting in touch with you all to make sure that we have all of those relevant plans and we probably don't so just let us know what we're missing and we'll start reviewing those.

So after that, we'll break through defining our goals and objectives, so we'll start that conversation today.

And then we'll start looking at, based on those goals and objectives, we'll start prioritizing the system needs, and then we'll prioritize the project.

So we divided those up, and we'll talk a little bit more about why that happens.

And then the last step before we finalize the plan will be to develop our implementation strategies.

So we've identified where we have needs, we've identified what projects we think are going to be most effective to meet the high priority needs, and then we're going to figure out what are the best opportunities to implement those projects.

And then the final step will be to try to analyze the priorities and amounts of time.

So in a little bit more detail, these first three tasks

These are things that we're going to do, like pulling existing information, not necessarily something that we're going out to the public in order to inform.

There will be room for public engagement, but this is really just evaluating where we are now, what do we already know, based on the information that we have.

One thing I do want to mention is that we can do a preliminary analysis of the updated demographic information, but the census data will not actually be available until 2023.

So we'll probably have to go back in the summer of 2023 once that becomes available and reassess and see if that changes anything.

Hopefully it won't be any significant changes, but we want to make sure that we have that on our radar.

And then like I said, we'll work with localities, VDOT, transit agencies,

Thank you for asking.

Where are you going to gather that?

Will we have access to see what land you are gathering?

Part of the problem is trying to figure out what all of it looks like and reach our own blind man or our own areas.

I'm just curious if we're trying to get a vision around what information you're collecting.

Will we be able to see that in some place?

I don't know that we necessarily plan to have that in a public lecture floor, but we can certainly have it available to share some sort of matrix or table contents or something like that.

We'll try to make sure that we keep that pretty organized so that

We know what's happening.

I mean, all of this is going to be a very transparent process.

I didn't know if you ever had something like that.

I don't think you need too much work to do something like that.

You know what?

And maybe by doing a little work upfront, we save ourselves all a little work down the road.

That's not a bad idea at all.

I'd like to say something about the reviewing plan process.

I think the most important reason to do that is to look at what the past plans recommended and see what was implemented and what wasn't.

And for all the things that weren't implemented,

Why?

Because if those impediments still exist, that's what we need to address.

I think too often we start a new planning process and we're red-eyed and most achieved and we think this time it's going to be different.

This time we're going to get it right.

But it's not the first planning done.

Sure, and one thing that I'll say to that is I think that's definitely within the realm of what we can discuss and maybe that's part of what we'll talk about when we get further down and to talk about implementation strategies specifically.

The other thing, the thing that I don't want to do though is just start in assuming that we have the same needs that have been identified previously.

That was something that we talked about when we started this prioritization process with the

with a growth and accessibility planning for critical assistance grant is I think sometimes we get stuck in like we have this list of projects that have already been identified and we want to keep going through those projects and you're right they have been implemented for a specific reason so I think one of the things we really want to make sure that we're doing as we're creating a process that we hope will be something that we can move forward and carry on you know like have this kind of be an ongoing process that we use

is that we're really thinking strategically about what are our most critical needs and matching projects to those critical needs.

And maybe those are projects that have already been developed and identified.

Maybe that means that we need to identify new projects.

So I think that's a good point.

Steven?

I just don't know that we're going to end up starting with a list of previous projects necessarily embedding from there.

Yeah, I think the impediments is the important part to it.

Sure.

And then we can see how do those impediments relate to the new needs.

Yeah, that's the whole... Sandy, I'd just also like to point out that

Right now the Albemarle County is going through a COP plan update.

It's like kind of following along the same schedule.

So just reviewing our existing plans may not be the, I mean, obviously that's a good starting point.

There's going to be a lot of changes, I think.

I'm just trying to think of timeline, like if it's going to be completed at the end, are we going to be doing this review?

Well, there will be a way.

We'll make sure that it works.

Let me pull together our schedule for the comp plan and how that works.

Yeah, and the other thing that is actually on the Gantt chart that we have talked about that will also need to coordinate is probably putting some begins in front of your elected bodies periodically through this process so that we're keeping them sort of in the loop so we'll also coordinate like maybe what else is on your agenda to know when those good times are maybe to get them from where

Yes.

So thank you, Kevin, for bringing that up.

That was exactly where I wanted to go with your comp plan.

And if we could at least get the schedule in front of each other.

So I think that's a great suggestion, Kevin, so that we could see potentially how they can intersect and where there could be information that's coming out of the comp plan, even if it's draft.

But you can begin to start to see where there could be areas that we need to look at because we know with transportation and SMART SCALE, it takes a long time to implement all those projects.

So if we can get ahead of some of them and begin to look at areas that are going to be impacted and how we can begin to develop projects that will facilitate the comp plan, which has been an issue with the current comp plan,

Yeah, we'll certainly, well, and that's why your participation and the participation of others that might be involved in the content process is going to be really helpful throughout this.

Yeah, I think we can use other data to estimate, to estimate population change.

Yeah, and just raising the issue because we're going to use kind of attention based, there's definitely question marks around what the accurate severity of the census count for

University students given the fact that the pandemic started just before the census.

Right.

And so a lot of students eventually cleared out and then were undercounted and now we're done.

Sure.

So there might be ways to get to that targeted piece of information given the fact that the university fills here, right?

Yeah.

But, or yeah, we may, I don't know what's going to happen in terms of whether the city might pick this up during the census.

Thank you for mentioning that.

Again, I think, I think we just need to know what level that information occurs because we have sort of a

Like the demographic information, specifically for Title VI purposes.

How does the whole differential privacy stuff start to impact that?

Because the block award zones aren't really regional anymore, right?

We are, yeah, so actually as part of the transit vision plan, they did some calibrations to the model and did some updates to the model to better reflect the accuracy of transit operations specifically.

So what they did, the only thing that they really did through that process was to calibrate

So we have been in touch with those consultants to send it over to VDOT, and VDOT will be working to update the model.

They also were able to update the population projections for the 2045.

We have the primary question here.

I don't have the answer to that.

I hope not, but...

One more interesting piece of information, Kevin and I talked about it briefly a couple of months back, the county quarterly preference plan did road projections and they were looking at a lot of parcel-based

information where they thought their growth might happen.

I don't, I've only seen the presentation with the board of supervisors, but I thought that was an interesting data set potentially that their consultants developed with them.

Michelle Franklin, what's her name?

Rachel, maybe an interesting person for you guys to talk to about that.

Thank you for mentioning that.

When does that occur in your process?

Yeah, that will occur under the implementation strategy.

The plan is being developed well within the existence of the SMART SCALE methodology, making sure that the plan really speaks to that, because I think that was definitely something that was a struggle last time, and how that impacts the way funding flows through a region, because you have this

duality now in Virginia where smart scale is the law, not the modeling, but that's how the vast majority of transportation funding is distributed to projects that are of like empty of concern.

But we still have the federal requirements that say you have to develop a constraint plan and those two might not be mutually exclusive to each other anymore.

So

I would take a look at some of the recently completed LRPTs, see if anybody's done an exceptionally good job at that.

Yeah, and if you recall, one of the things that we were doing was preparing our consultants and health advisors, and that's specifically one of the tasks that we wanted some guidance on as well to do that well.

And not just looking at SMART SCALE, but looking at implementation strategies in general.

So, you know, knowing

All right, so our next step is we will define the goals and objectives.

So one of the things that we talked about specifically as we were starting this process with the OIP is do we want to basically assume that we are going to use the same goals from 2045 into this water and transportation plan?

And I think we want to use this as a baseline.

My recommendation, I'm going to go through this a little bit more, is that we probably do some minor re-categorization on the goals just to reflect some of the more recent local and emerging priorities.

But the idea will be that we will develop sort of the overarching mold categories and then the public engagement will inform how important those goals are in weight compared to each other.

So I'll talk about goals a little bit later, but any questions about that from a general perspective?

So that's a good leading question, Stephen.

Yeah, I think the goals and objectives should inform the performance measures.

I'll also keep it in mind that

The performance measures are going to generally translate to the goals and objectives, so we're not necessarily going to have a precise measurement that could specifically relate to every objective separately.

So I think they should be informed by each other, also understanding that we're working in a world where we're limited to the data that's already available and determining how we can best use that data to inform the

So really, the prioritization process is broken into two different steps.

The first is to identify the priority needs.

So we'll take the goals and objectives that have been identified by the public.

We'll develop performance measures.

That's what we're working on with OIP, to develop performance measures that will help us

So the second step of that is going to be to take those needs, identify where we already have existing projects or where there's like a pretty straightforward project that could be applied to meet that need.

And so my thought is that we are likely going to end up with priority needs divided into two categories.

One is that it's a really important critical need.

We don't know what to do about it yet, so we need to do some studies to figure out what the appropriate improvements are in order to meet that need.

And then there will be priority needs where we already have projects that have been identified that would resolve that need, or there's a pretty straightforward project that we can easily apply to that.

And so we'll take those projects that have been identified, apply them to the priority needs, and then we'll add in some additional information like the actual estimated cost.

Questions about that?

Okay.

Does that make sense?

I think it might also be worth identifying, hey, we think this would be a great way to measure this, but also it's not feasible for us to measure that today.

But could we put that on the table?

Yeah, and we'll talk about this a little more in detail.

I know you guys are anxious to hear a little bit about what's been happening with it with your grant, so we'll talk a little bit about where we are.

And it might also depend.

We might, we might consider this and say, you know what, this data does tell us exactly what it is that we want to know, and we can certainly evaluate, you know, what we would love to see in a perfect realm in the next realm to help always be able to inform Wisconsin's better.

Alright, so then the last steps are really about developing the implementation strategy.

So as I mentioned, and as you were discussing, we want to look at the additional federal grant sources, but there also might also be some things that we can do to coordinate with land use planning, you know, the private sector and those kinds of things.

MPA's are trying to be really innovative about coordinating with their local jurisdictions on some of these things, so

It's not that we have to do that.

I think it's just a discussion that we'll want to have on like what are our opportunities and try to make sure that we're not putting ourselves into a box unnecessarily on the get-go and thinking more broadly about the implementation strategies that could be used even if we don't end up wanting to use them.

Any other questions and comments?

That's the overall process for the scope.

So generally,

We want to present this to the policy board.

We want to get their buy-in.

I think you'll probably hear a lot about outreach to underserved communities.

I think the county won't show the city too.

We're all going to want to make sure that we're coming up with good ways to reach voices that you don't typically hear from.

And we are working, I'll talk a little bit more, we do have a public engagement plan, but we'll also work with the consultants to sort of refine that and hopefully get some additional strategies and support and thinking through how to do that well and which means and where are the appropriate points for engagement.

You guys feel pretty good with this process?

As Michael said, and then we'll see what happens when we actually start working through it.

But generally, that's the framework that we'll try to follow.

All right.

So we're just having a general conversation about goals right now.

These are not necessarily, you know, I haven't got to a point where we've started drafting the language around these goals.

But we have to start kind of talking about general things that we want to be able to measure and evaluate as part of this process.

So the column on the far left is the 2045 pan goals.

And then we did a little bit of a benchmarking exercise as part of the OIHE grant.

And then I added in Lynchburg and Santa Rosa, Williamsburg as well, just because they're smaller NPOs to consider.

So you can see that for the large part, there's a lot of similarity.

It's just a matter of mostly how these things are grouped together.

So we had,

We have grouped together the accessibility and variability.

And then Richmond had put equity and accessibility together.

So there are reasons to do it one way or the other.

Safety was pretty standard.

Economic development and land use, people did that differently.

You know, so congestion, people call it different things, connectivity, efficiency, and mobility.

It's all kind of getting at that congestion mitigation and the efficient operations of the transportation system.

We also provide environment and community.

So community was kind of what we were referring to as equity.

And then the one that was a little bit different for us compared to the others was this last one, which was the operations and maintenance.

And I've had some conversations with Michael and Chuck about the operations and maintenance, and we may want to have a discussion on whether we want to lead this.

as a standalone goal or not, just because the funding for the ongoing maintenance of the transportation system is kind of separate from the applications that we would be submitting for project construction.

And it's determined by the state, the state prioritizes it based on them meeting their performance of measures for bridge and pavement conditions and those kinds of things.

In the past, it was largely driven by bridge replacement, more so than true operations and maintenance.

Sure.

That and signal operation and connectivity and things like that.

And it can't be incorporated in the other roles.

But we didn't want to lose sight.

It's kind of like a holdover before we did the SMART SCALE process.

So we'll talk about that in the next slide a little bit too.

So we just started off with doing this benchmarking exercise.

So I mentioned I thought it might be helpful to re-categorize some of these goals into the categories.

And so this is what we're kind of recommending is that safety needs to be, and this will start giving you an idea of the kinds of objectives that would be considered over each of these categories.

So safety is looking at how do we reduce the number of severity of crashes from vehicles and then also looking

improving the safety of all users, the whole time they're all users as well.

It's important, I think, to pull out the multi-modal users to make sure that both of those concerns are being addressed so that there's some sort of winging that's applied to both of those.

My recommendation, instead of providing equity and accessibility, or accessibility and mobility, would be to combine equity and accessibility because the accessibility is really measuring

Access to jobs and activity centers throughout the area, which feels like it has a much stronger equity component than maybe the vulnerability.

And so one of the ways, we'll talk about this when I go through the point of the process, but one of the ways that we talk about this is we can weight the overall access to jobs and activity centers for users based on a certain mode.

So it would be like access to a job center by transit within 45 minutes.

And then weight that against

The underserved community population in that area.

And so you end up sort of having a way to compare, you know, this is who has access.

This is how many underserved populations have access.

And then you can start seeing where there are significant discrepancies.

Knowability and congestion mitigation felt to me like they probably made a little bit more sense to be grouped together.

So that's really about increasing system efficiency

increasing modal choice and increase the reliability.

Same thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Even in the 2045 land congestion goal, it's very

It's like, where appropriate, improve revenue design for congestion.

It's already catching.

Sorry, but they thought that they should keep it.

I think where this would come into play might be looking at maybe less of the system operations level and more at the more closely given to like recommended improvements because once you start evaluating different kinds of improvements.

So when you go through a SMART SCALE process or your platform funding, one of the things that they do is you have to go through and evaluation them alternative improvements.

So you start with the lower cost and see what that would do to fix whatever the issue is that you're trying to apply for to fix.

And then you go to the next solution, next solution, next solution.

So you have to do this evaluation process.

So I think the congestion would probably be significant once you're talking about the improvements, because if you're doing something related to safety,

and you know that there are future growth projections and that there are already operations concerns and of course operations concerns can also contribute to safety concerns.

In certain situations, we're improving congestion and we're working against overall efficiency.

If you're talking about something like a dedicated bus lane on 29, to borrow from the unconstrained vision on the transportation vision, that would potentially increase congestion for cars but improve the efficiency of the system in that more people are moving along it quickly in a bus.

So we're similar for like N

You can imagine how that would probably be bad for congestion measures for the level of service, but would or could improve the efficiency of the system overall.

So to me, efficiency, I think, makes sense.

I think it makes sense to keep these together here just because we

A lot of the measures that are used for economic development in the state plan and other planning efforts like the economic development ready sites and things like that or free travel, those kinds of things don't really seem to apply as closely to Charlottesville and the Albemarle area where we're hearing about the free traffic seems to be more free traffic that's literally identified traffic.

So I think it makes sense to keep these groups together and then we can use something like

the existing zoning and the future land use to help us plan for that.

And then the environment, if you remember originally in our 2045 plan, the environment and community were left together as one whole, but because local colleagues have identified environmental considerations, but because this is a priority planning issue that has been identified from the Federal Highway Administration, I think it makes sense to pull this out as its own category.

And so some of the things that we could use

to guide measurements about that.

It's promoting sustainable transportation improvements, reducing emissions, and then one of the SCALE measures that makes sense is to avoid encroachments on historic and culturally sensitive features.

And then we can talk about the system preservation.

What we had talked about is what would be grand effect.

Maybe we don't evaluate system preservation directly, but maybe we want to make sure that as we are identifying these needs, we consider

system preservation means.

So we know if something has already been identified as a maintenance need specifically for a bridge, you know, maybe that's something that we want to do stuff for a little bit, because if we know that it's already a maintenance need and we want to do something different with it, that might be something that we want to prioritize a little bit higher than

We talked a little bit, Michael, you're welcome to share anything in addition if you want to.

We talked a little bit about VDOT, about what the opportunities might be to coordinate with the state of good repair and the maintenance schedules of the state and really there aren't a lot of great opportunities that we can really incorporate into the long-range transportation plan just because the funding is different and the

And the timelines are different and things like that.

But again, I think as far as wanting to maintain the system of preservation and knowing if there's anything beyond what the existing condition is that we want to maintain, knowing that there is some sort of maintenance need that could help us want to prioritize that project a little bit further.

About the working environment, is there any way to look at impacts on natural resources as well?

Yeah, that was a question I had.

If you look at VTRANs though, the way they kind of, their approach to measuring the resiliency.

So it might be just some information that might be a matter of just looking and seeing what information might be available that can inform that as, you know, sort of a performance measure.

Because VTRANs address the flooding, and that's really like their resiliency category is really related to flooding.

And there really aren't, I think I looked at the VTRAN, there were two locations that weren't identified in one of the most rigorous.

The agency wasn't really going to significantly inform it if we're talking about resiliency from flooding.

So I think we probably need to do some research, Kevin, to see how we can more meaningfully incorporate those resiliency considerations.

It's interesting, by the way, resiliency in the system reservation.

Some places with dress relates intend to apply, it's like a screening criteria for doing project selection.

So if you were out reconfiguring a stretch of roadway for geometry related to safety or something like that, hey, maybe you should also look at your culvert capacities and make sure that their design storms

And it's not a design storm that existed 75 years ago.

So you're taking the opportunity to address flooding or things, or the potential for flooding when you're essentially kind of creating a high level scope.

of the project because the idea of being a resiliency can, you know, integrate all levels of a project.

I agree with you.

When I'm looking at this, there's two ways, for example, there's two ways the bridge can fail, right?

It gets old, or the water gets too hot, right?

And the same thing in pavement is in the system preservation category.

One way it can get undercut over time.

And on the other one, actually, the one I'm talking about, and it may not be an issue for us, but extreme heat is leading to issues in some places where it hasn't paved the way.

I can put system preservation down there as kind of a goal space, but not something that's... Yeah, thank you.

It's not a driving issue, and I love the idea of incorporating it into other projects, but it seems appropriate to identify it as a goal.

Sure.

I believe they went through a process in the 2040 plan to do mobile emission modeling.

It might not be what you want to do this round.

There might be something more focused on

Sure, yeah, and we'll talk about this, probably this will be an awkward conversation, but one of the things you've been talking about with OIP is that this might be something that isn't like a quantifiable, like, scored, like, or evaluated process.

It might be that there's, like, our pricing as a side by side.

Yeah, something like that.

That might have already, that might already be found.

I feel pretty confident that that might have been my error in taking this.

Any other feedback?

All right, so the needs and project prioritization process.

So this is, I know you guys had some questions about this at the last meeting, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to answer all of them, but I know I can answer a lot of them today.

So the process that we're working for with the Office of Intermittal Planning and Investment is developing the performance measures to create this prioritization process.

So we've already talked about the idea of why it's important to prioritize the needs first.

And then one thing that I want to mention, though, is that as we prioritize the system needs, not all of these goals are going to necessarily be evaluated at the system level.

Because as we just discussed, some of them are not really going to make a lot of sense.

And so we start talking about what the actual impacts of the project implementation are going to be.

So this is, again, something that I can provide feedback to our consultants.

They want to hear what kind of feedback you all have, but this is what they have recommended based on their thought process as far as we've gotten the process so far.

The other thing that I want to mention is that one of the discussions that we had with Shackelford, who is the person who manages this program for Whitley,

is that it probably makes sense not to rely so heavily on the model to look at the future needs and focus first of all on as we're prioritizing our system needs to look at the existing conditions and focus sort of our planning efforts around where are there already some deficiencies and start planning for those and then when we start looking at what we're talking about the alternative but improvement alternatives we can start looking at making sure that our improvements that are recommended also consider the future needs but that we're really making sure we

We prioritize addressing the critical needs that are in existence currently.

So a couple of things for the framework for development of the prioritization process is that the goal for WICI is to be able to build their capacity to support other localities and ethnicities and regions in this process.

So they have a couple of guidelines that they're working for as they're providing these technical systems.

One of them is to use the publicly accessible data or data that's specific to our MPO, so they don't want us using sources that would be hard for other localities to use.

The methodology is based on our existing staff and technical capabilities, so they did an assessment of our internal capacity early on, so this is based on something that is implemented by our staff with the technology that we currently have.

All right, so we started developing, we used that referring work with the goals based on the 2045 plan to start looking at what we could actually measure as part of, you know, as part of prioritizing these processes.

And also, keep in mind,

That running through this prioritization process is really just a starting point for a conversation.

You know, there may be reasons that even though something is identified as a high priority, there may be public opposition to it, or there might be a coordination issue or something like that.

So this is really just a place to start the conversation from a somewhat productive perspective of looking at the information that's available.

So the safety elements that we can use to measure are the potential for safety improvement both at the intersection and second level.

And this is developed by the state as part of their Highway Safety Action Plan.

And there's a website if anybody wants to see it, I created a link so I'm not being too different to it.

Basically, one of the things that we also wanted to be mindful of is that there's going to be a little bit of a discrepancy as far as the prioritization of some of these needs in Charlottesville versus Albemarle.

What happens to vehicular safety?

There are a lot more needs in Albemarle.

When it comes to the bicycle safety, there are a lot more needs in Charlottesville.

So one of the things we wanted to do was to create separate lists

We just didn't want to remove anybody from this safety list category and not be able to include them in the future evaluation in case it started creating sort of like a snowball of priorities that cycle around these one locations based on other things.

And then as far as the bicycle and pedestrian crash hotspot, I'll be honest that this looks very technical and I'm not going to be able to explain this in very good detail, but the technical description of how they're suggesting that we do this and they're going to provide us a model, they're going to provide a technical memo and I'm explaining this in a lot more detail, I just don't have it yet, but I'll be happy to pass it on.

But the technical description of what they're doing is you can curl them to the estimation

based on the linear referencing system measurement analysis that VDOT uses.

But in layman's terms, they're basically using spatial statistics to determine a local area that crashes are located around.

So if you have any questions on that, I can turn it into that or else I'm happy to also forward on the technical note.

Anybody much interested in the technical notes?

If we look at the PSI, the Potential for Safety Improvement intersections, what you'll see is that if you just prioritize the top ten lists in the region as a whole, like eight or nine of those ten are going to be at Albemarle.

So what we wanted to do was to take the top segment in Albemarle and then take the top segments in Charlottesville to make sure that they're all included on the list

And then we'll pull all of that information into an overall project prioritization process.

I'm sorry to say, because I don't want to clarify that question.

If you were to take the top 20 PSI segments in the region, they'd almost all be in account.

I feel like property damage only, damage is not, you know,

When you deal with crashes always remember a crash is an anomalous event based on the data because the data you know somebody passes through that intersection 10,000 times

So when you're dealing with crashes and then when you go to the bike path crashes, they're the anomaly of the anomaly.

I'm a little concerned about this focus on bicycle and pedestrian crashes because I think for most people, for the average person, walking and cycling are perceived to be not safe.

And so they don't do it.

And so our mode share is incredibly low.

Like Wood is saying, it's an anomaly.

So if we're just looking at where crashes are occurring in the current system, I don't feel like that's really addressing

The perceived danger of the system as a whole.

Is there some way that we're measuring people's perceptions of safety towards those modes systematically?

And how are we identifying needs and prioritizing those to address that?

How can we get to a bicycling and pedestrian system in Charlottesville that people actually will use because they think it's safe?

I don't know.

I think we're just looking at the crashes that are occurring.

And we're looking at the operation, so we're trying to tie the needs.

I think what you might be talking about, Stephen, is kind of a longer term project that I see and I've had conversations with various organizations about this, too.

I think there's work outside of the LRT that we need to do related specifically to bicycle and pedestrian safety connectivity in general.

I don't know that we're going to be able to do this into the LRTP process itself, but I think there's an opportunity for us to identify in the LRTP where we need to do some of that additional like studies and plans and considerations and things like that.

But really what we're trying to do right here is to look at where do we already know that there are existing conditions that make things unsafe?

And then we want to look at how do we proactively plan to prevent

I think we're addressing that in different ways.

that could carry large amounts of pedestrians and bicyclists and find out where there's gaps or safety needs on that corridor so that we can try and go back and fix it.

Yeah, aren't we kind of doing that with different roles because we have the demand

So we're looking at the land use, where the people are, and then on another aspect, we're looking at current safety issues.

So that's what we kind of struggled with was, we know where people want to go, kind of, and we know where the crashes are, but it's that subjective, but I don't feel safe, therefore I'm not biting, therefore I'm not.

And that kind of bridges the gap, I'm still trying to be objective.

and then when we present it to the Planning Commission and to City Council and to the public, that's where we can get more subjective.

If I identify this as the highest priority, actually we think this is another one that needs to be included.

This will also be important through the public engagement as well.

So I think that's a really great point.

I think there are both great points, right?

Like from that, like from a, you know,

I think we're trying to build our capacity to do that so that's why I really want to like not over commit to being able to do those as part of this plan but say that we as an organization, as an FPO, and I know as localities have identified that that is an information need and that is a planning need and build out to that and we're able to incorporate it and we can.

Radio colliery.

I think that's going to feel vile if this is it.

The problem is we have a hundred side walls and we need to do a hundred funs.

I just imagine that as we move through this process and start to put all of these different performance measures or goals together, that things will come out of that.

And I can't figure out exactly how to get together right now.

If you consider something like accessibility along with your language factor together, maybe there's something that will start to see a pattern.

But I do think that there will be also pipeline opportunities that will be identified.

That's where we identify if we need more information and we have the ability.

We've already asked, what else do we measure?

Objective set of measures we can look at around the world.

Where are people?

So the way that they are suggesting that we do this is that we are understanding the need for access to activity centers by node.

So we're looking at if you look at a 45 minute drive versus a 45 minute transit ride versus a 45 minute walk versus a 45 minute bike ride,

How many people have access to those jobs?

And then we look at how many people represent disadvantaged populations based off whatever data set that we use to get our demographic information, have access to those jobs.

And so what that helps us start doing is to start looking at where are there significant discrepancies between access by different mode, but then access specifically as it relates to the disadvantaged or under-shared population.

So this is based on using National Accessibility Evaluation data which looks at activity centers that are specific to Albemarle and Charlottesville, I believe it's the University of Minnesota that develops this and reports out annually on the block level.

And so then there's a weighting system that occurs in order to be able to identify that

So this starts helping us identify, to y'all's point about the safety and accessibility, this starts helping us look at where are there significant issues with accessibility by different modes, which maybe, well, like Kevin was saying, as we start overlaying these concerns on top of each other, it might help us see the picture of, you know, there's no infrastructure here to support anybody being able

Yeah, so I think this one does a really good job of incorporating equity into the need in the performance sector.

I'm curious if there's going to be a similar equity lens for the other needs.

So thinking back to safety, would there be, how are these

How is safety measured?

That's a good question.

I think the assumption that's probably in place is that the safety considerations for the bicycle pedestrian crashes are probably prioritized safety concerns for disadvantaged communities, but that's something I can take back to the

If we do, or we're doing everything we can to address

The data sets that are available are pretty specific to these itemified activity centers.

So one of the things we need to make sure that we understand really well is how they are itemified in these activity centers and making sure that that feels like it is accurate for us.

And then the mobility that we are not referring to as congestion mitigation has a couple of different performance measures that they have identified that will go into this discussion.

So the first is the travel time index, which is the

ratio, the average travel time and peak hours to free flight travel time.

So if it takes you 10 minutes to get somewhere on a Saturday morning at 10 o'clock, but it takes you 15 minutes to get there on Monday morning at 8 o'clock, your travel time index is 1.5 because it takes you 15% longer to get there under the average travel time.

So then there's this travel time reliability, which means that it's really, really, really important for you to be on time

This is the level of buffer that you need to ensure that you will be on time 95% of the time.

So that's basically saying that the average travel conditions might be 50% longer than my normal trip, but if I need to make sure that I'm on time, I actually need to double the amount of time that I leave.

So that's the travel time reliability.

If I want to be on time knowing that there could be significant congestion, I need to leave myself a buffer.

And then the level of travel time reliability

is how often you have to take longer to get to your place.

So how long are you into that buffer beyond the average peak hour conditions is a level of travel time reliability.

So those are some of the ways that we can measure performance measures for the mobility.

I think, you know, while this does kind of feel like it has the congestion

Yeah, like more and more throughput over like road surface area because we're investing in lanes, we're talking about not wanting to widen roads.

Yeah, I think the challenge of that is the amount of effort it would take to evaluate that data.

So remember this whole model is based on our existing fact capacity and technical ability.

So you can do some of that that relies more heavily on the modeling side of things.

So I think that's one of the

Like in an ideal world, I agree with you.

There are other organizations that do that.

There are other organizations that are much more technical that are doing that that we don't have.

So that's one of those things that we just have to balance that we might not be able to get the exact level of information with for urgency out of this.

I was just going to say my initial reaction was this was very congestion and car focused.

You said they were going to look at whether they can also use these tools to measure on roads.

I don't imagine that they can just because I've never seen

Data on congestion protocols, but the other thing that came to mind and this is about prioritizing meetings.

It's not about what the solution necessarily is taking the other side.

And if we have the, if we can move it through, a solution might be to allow for more, to actually devote more road space to denser forms of transportation, rather than what is the reflex action that we take, which is to widen the road.

Right?

Now,

There's a lot more community engagement that would need to happen to get to that solution, but increasingly that notion is out there.

Yeah, and that is a good point just to remember where we're at in this process.

We're looking at the system needs.

So these are things that we can measure and then our solutions can more comprehensively address some of our goals for what the vision of our transportation system will look like.

So one thing that they are recommending that I wanted to also run by you all is that they felt that these were the performance measures that made no sense for the system evaluation as a whole.

So what's not included as far as looking at the existing needs is the economic development and land use coordination and then the environmental considerations because basically the thought process is that those are going to be really

And while you're kind of developing land use here, are we thinking about like,

Yeah, so one of the ways that a lot of places measure this is like proximity to like identify economic development sites or supporting freight traffic to live patients, things like that.

Those don't really make a lot of sense for Charlottesville.

It seems like based on the discussions that we've had,

So really we're talking about like how can we make sure that we are considering that there's an existing need in one place, but that that existing need might be exacerbated at a faster rate because there is planned for development in this area compared to maybe another area, maybe something along those lines.

Well, I think the biggest example of where we've struggled with this is Willow Tree.

Willow Tree was growing and was going to move away and we needed to find a place for Willow Tree to grow into.

and we wound up putting them in Woolen Mills, which is not a very accessible place.

So thinking about economic development and land use, are we thinking now and plan now for as businesses grow in Charlottesville and need to have market footprint, where are we gonna put them?

Where there's already good transit infrastructure and all these other things that we're thinking about.

So for me, that's a great case study.

What have we learned from that?

And how are we gonna prevent that from happening in the future?

I feel like the causality there is the opposite of what we can affect here, right?

I mean, we could go tell the Albemarle EDA to not put people in abandoned factories and industrial areas.

But to me, it seems that the fact that they did that and moved there means that because we now have this economic development and land use stuff going on, now we have all these new needs on Broadway that

Yeah, I mean, working as a transit operator, I would much rather that we figure out the transit and the transportation first, rather than, okay, we put this in woolen middles, how are we going to get a bus down there?

I mean, that's fair.

Yeah.

So from an operations perspective,

Right.

So it will treat as a symptom or an example of our need that we want companies to grow, we want them to be able to relocate to certain types of land

infrastructure.

How are we planning for that?

What is that mean?

What is the size of that mean?

How much land use do we need to accommodate those kinds of companies?

How quickly are they growing?

This is Juwhan.

So Steve and I have been saying this over and over again at pretty much every meeting but yeah it's exactly the problem is not getting a bus there but where to put a bus stop but in Willem Mills case the issue was also how do you get a bus there so so many times people move to locations and expect a bus to show up and a lot of times we can't do that and so that that does need to be considered on the front end

such as the new development Kevin's put up over the new stopover on Rio.

Juwhan has a good point because there's cost associated with

running a new route or re-routing a new route, both for delivering a fixed route and then also providing complementary Indian paratransit.

So, you know, always the fact is who ends up bearing that cost?

Is it the developer?

Is it the locality?

Is it the feds?

Sure.

Okay.

I will not do that.

Sorry.

And then the environmental factors do feel like they're really highly localized and aspired.

But, you know, we don't know what exactly the effects are going to be on congestion, you know, mitigation, or non-congestion mitigation on like emissions reductions and things like that until we're looking at that specific project.

I mean, I think where environment really factors into needs is like where, like what places and routes have the most potential for road shift, like where it's going to be accomplished most easily.

And that's kind of a little bit more of a locational question that kind of gets back to what we're talking about there, like latent demand.

Well, and some of this is going to, there's interrelationships between some of these, right?

And then we're looking after congestion is really bad, obviously, but there's one thing to address is congestion concerns will be, will be also addressing the environmental concerns in them by improving mobility for people about different things.

There's also sort of like an overlap.

So I think some of that will be captured.

Okay.

So then just saying that we haven't really gotten to the project prioritization.

We've really been working for the needs.

So I'll talk to them a little bit about the land use and economic development.

But what we have proposed is that we use the current zoning and then the future land use to do the coordination with the land use and economic development.

And then the environmental factors, I'll have a discussion with them and see how we can also add some footage

But that basically summarizes the working process to the best of my abilities at this time.

Are those Terry Brady ads satisfied?

I don't know.

They haven't reviewed the particular record.

I do want to be a little bit mindful of time.

It's 11.40, so we'll try to go quickly through the rest at the end of it.

But thank you all.

All right, next up, we've got hatred for all.

Sandy, can we get your presentation?

What's that?

Can we get your presentation?

There'll be a bunch of other information behind that.

You're not allowed to ask any other questions on that.

So some of you may be aware that the PBC recently applied for an SS-4A to save a few people over a discretionary grant.

All six jurisdictions participated.

That application is due September 15th.

There's $5.6 billion available over the next five years.

There are two types of grants.

There's the plane, and then there's the implementation, which we owe for the implementation part of the grant for the first of that operating safety action.

These are the components of CTAC

or has a comprehensive safety action plan.

These are right here.

In this comprehensive safety action plan, the PDC will be working with VDOT.

So we'll see.

Gotcha.

So I guess the question is like, are there other people with

This is one of the most unique phrases I've ever seen in a no-go coming from the federal government that they will announce awards.

As expeditiously yet flexibly as possible.

Yes.

So it said, you know, hopefully within a year of an award, you'd have a contract.

Great, I wonder if that means they want you, do they want us to have our, to do a process before we sign a contract?

Right now we are in Discover Transit Month.

All of the providers and agencies are partnering with DRPT for that, so it is a statewide initiative.

Next month in October is RideShare Month, and we actually just received some of the toolkits for some of the marketing for that.

During Discover Transit Month, it is also the one-year birthday slash anniversary, however you want to call it, of the Active Express, so the commuter bus route that comes over from the Valley area.

We have been

Doing promotions all month for that on every Thursday.

Last week we were handing out birthday cupcakes at the UVA Stocks, which was kind of fun and well received.

It was a really good opportunity for us to get feedback from the riders and from other folks who were just curious.

I think we found a couple new potential riders, gave them a fare card to give it a go for one day and see how they like it.

So that's been really exciting.

That will also roll into RideShare Month a little bit.

There will be some sort of giveaway, I'm sure, for folks who sign up and also log their trips through the RideShare app both this month and I imagine next month as well.

Like I said, we just kind of got the update of the initial materials for that.

So stay tuned.

It is, yes.

It would be transitioning into their regular rural funding.

It's less of an application and more rolling it into the allotment that they receive for rural funding.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So, I mean, there is an application piece, but it's awesome just, you know, doing the accounting work.

They're going to have to come up with a local match for that as well.

I do not know how they are going to approach the local match at this time around, but they will have to come up with some level of local match.

Their operations mode is unique in the Commonwealth in that they don't own any of their transit

Assets.

So they have to do what's called capital cost of contracting.

Essentially, they lease both operations and equipment.

And it's just because of the way they do that, the way the funding is distributed is slightly different for them versus a job to our cat.

I do know that they have said that they were putting together information to go out and to meet with all of the funding partners to talk about the next phase of moving out of the demonstration into the overall operating application phase.

I can also say that

I haven't seen, obviously this month's ridership, but the last report I received, they were up to some days of 60 riders a day, which I think the initial study that was done to get the pilot up and running said that, you know, the ultimate goal was to reach 80.

And I don't think that was necessarily in the demonstration phase, but that that was where they wanted to be.

So that's pretty darn close to where they're going.

So.

All right, sounds good.

Yeah, I mean, I know that they're still moving through with putting out the RFP for starting that project.

There was a vote at the last MPO meeting to remove the green tea that was at Angus.

Well, I don't know that this group knows that that was even happening.

So, so in round four, we submitted a package of projects for our hydraulic 29 intersection that included a lot of different improvements, included like five different improvements.

So it included a roundabout at Hillsdale, it included some bike head improved structure, it included a crossing over pedestrian crossing number 29 at Zane Road, it included some removal of left turn lanes between hydraulic and 29 to improve system efficiencies, and it also included a continuous green tea intersection on Angus Road going on to

I guess while you're putting things extension of the left turn lane on the eastbound

So what happened is that they ran into some financial constraints where the estimated budget, due to some changes in compensation requirements to private owners, they ran into a situation where the estimated cost of the project was going to exceed the amount requested as part of the application.

And so they needed to find a way to reduce the scale of the project.

And so one of the things that they requested is that we

So two quick questions.

It will have to be ADA compliant.

US businesses have stairs in addition to them.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

Okay, cool, that would be nice.

And then the other question, so I know we're at CTD today, giving back a lot of money for West Main and Preston Grady and getting a little bit of money back for Fontaine and the other one.

So there wasn't enough to still do the green tea in Angus, though.

With more money, we can go there.

And then is there money left over that goes into a called pepper pot?

We're still over budgeted even by the green tea.

Yeah, you see that across the state right now.

It changes the state law.

It needs to be right away.

Really, really driving up costs significantly.

It's complicated, but it's how to calculate damages to properties.

Call your little legislator.

One quick update.

Our rail team is wrapping up the statewide rail plan and is hosting a virtual public meeting on September 27th from 6 to 7 p.m.

If people are interested in attending, I can share the link with the MPO staff and we can get that out.

Last thing I wanted to say, we're working through this FART SCALE stuff, and we're getting our statements, understanding the project scopes for all the projects that are wrapping up right now.

I think I got the last one from the county yesterday, and the other eight that are being managed by the PDC and the NPL are about halfway through those, looking for coordination of wood calories, I assume on that.

to ensure that the reflective project was moving out of the validation phase and the scoring soon enough.

We still have not gotten the estimates for these projects.

I have a question for James, you're talking about Jeanette.

So since we pulled our FISSHOOT SCALE application, there was talk about doing a pilot thing instead, possibly?

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Making a graduate.

All right.

Sounds good.

Anything else?

Madison Bullock.

All right.