Meeting Transcripts
Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission
MPO Technical Committee Meeting 9/19/2023
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MPO Technical Committee Meeting
9/19/2023
SPEAKER_08
00:00:03
Jessica Hirsch-Bowery, Michael Bormer, Luis Carrazano, Ben Chambers, James Freese, Tiffany Dubinsky, Christine Jacobs, Katie Lacy, Bill Palmer, Sarah Pennington,
SPEAKER_09
00:00:32
Present Tony Choi Albert Here
00:00:58
We'll start with a match from the public between them and members of the public.
SPEAKER_08
00:01:07
We really wish to speak.
SPEAKER_09
00:01:13
All right.
00:01:14
Acceptance of the agenda.
00:01:15
Approval of the August 15th minutes.
SPEAKER_08
00:01:18
Do I hear a motion?
00:01:19
Any corrections?
00:01:23
I'll move the motion.
SPEAKER_08
00:01:25
Second?
00:01:26
Second.
SPEAKER_09
00:01:28
All in favor say aye.
00:01:30
Aye.
00:01:31
Any opposed?
00:01:35
Any abstentions?
00:01:37
Alright, minutes passed unanimously.
00:01:39
Next up, moving towards 2050, public engagement.
SPEAKER_05
00:01:43
Yeah, I just want to let you know we have consultants from EPR here, so Will Cockrell is joining us in person and then he is also joined by Alan Simpson online and they have been working on our public engagement feedback and they are going to be doing the bulk of the presenting today.
SPEAKER_07
00:02:12
All right.
00:02:13
Well, good morning, everyone.
00:02:14
Thanks for having us here.
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We're going to just do an overview here of works of the engagement process so far on the long range transportation plan update.
00:02:27
It's been busy here this year on the engagement side for the long range plan.
00:02:34
do have an agenda here of going through what the PDC's engagement goals have been throughout this process.
00:02:41
Certainly there are variables and conditions to consider with any type of engagement process that you're doing.
00:02:46
So we'll go over that.
00:02:48
Have an overview of the, oh, whoops.
00:02:54
I have an overview of the efforts done so far just to make sure that we have documented that as well as
00:03:03
We have the pending engagement report that's coming out a little bit later this month.
00:03:07
So you should have that completed by the end of September and have that available to you all.
00:03:12
And then some initial findings and Alan's going to jump on, he's online, Alan Simpson with EPR and he's going to go through the initial findings here and the next steps.
00:03:37
So a few things, first of all, on the engagement side, the PDC wanted to make sure that their MPO is getting public engagement on setting goals.
00:03:54
So the goal statements that are really the foundation for the performance measures.
00:03:59
Undefining needs as well as prioritizing projects.
00:04:03
That was an essential piece here, identifying needs of the survey and we'll go over a lot of the public engagement strategies used so far really aimed towards identifying what some of those travel needs or concerns are in the region as well as prioritizing and selecting projects, talk to that and then affirming and reviewing the plan document itself when we get further along the process.
00:04:29
In terms of
00:04:30
real engagement goals.
00:04:32
MPO is really striving to achieve a more representative engagement where we're reaching out to everyone, including underserved groups, neighborhoods that aren't necessarily active in the transportation dialogue typically.
00:04:49
Wanted to also be meaningful so that when we ask the community to take time to provide feedback and provide engagement,
00:04:58
that there's a very clear communication back to them that their feedback and their time is being used in the process.
00:05:07
We don't want to ask any questions if there's not some real intention on using that feedback.
00:05:12
So it's very important that it's a meaningful process.
00:05:16
And understanding transportation planning is not the most intuitive thing out there.
00:05:20
We were talking recently about
00:05:24
the MPO, updating their LRTP, put projects in the TIP so the CTP can be in the SYIP.
00:05:31
So it's not super intuitive so we want to make sure that when we communicate out to the public that we're doing so in a way that it's digestible to the community.
00:05:40
All right just a few variables that we wanted to document on the front end of the process and make sure that we were clear on it.
00:05:50
Some of these
00:05:51
you might call them challenges or things that we wanted to address throughout the public engagement process as well.
00:05:58
First off is long range planning is inherently difficult.
00:06:01
For any of you folks who are in local government, you might see this quite a bit when you had your comprehensive plan update.
00:06:08
Depending on where you are, you might not get a lot of involvement on that.
00:06:13
You might have some empty rooms when you plan those public meetings.
00:06:17
But when that first rezoning comes up, then all of a sudden,
00:06:22
becomes a lot more tangible
00:06:34
it's a little bit hard to ask folks you know what do you envision the next 20 years when you have a transportation project coming up and there's going to be construction in front of your home or business suddenly that's much more tangible it's a lot easier to get that engagement there so that was one thing we wanted to overcome also there's just been
00:06:54
numerous engagement processes in the region between the county's comprehensive plan, the city's comprehensive plan, which is not not long ago, the transit vision plan, there's been plenty of other transportation efforts out there with engagement.
00:07:09
And that really kind of eats up the real estate in terms of the engagement capital out there.
00:07:15
So we wanted to think about ways to get around that.
00:07:20
and then again transportation is just it's a technical thing it's sometimes a little counterintuitive so that was that was another challenge that we wanted to acknowledge and account for in the process.
00:07:35
So in terms of actual engagement efforts I think PDC MTO staff has really gone you know really above and beyond on trying to reach out to the community
00:07:46
using a number of different strategies out there from small stakeholder meetings, there's a virtual meeting, open house, community survey, presentations to the CACs in the county, presentations to different community groups, online materials and so forth.
00:08:06
I just want to give an overview of those one by one so that we are all on the same page of what MPO has been doing so far.
00:08:17
On the stakeholder meetings, we had those in this room right here back in February, and that assembled different groups such as major employers, public safety professionals, as well as other community partners here.
00:08:32
Really, the purpose of that was to get their feedback on the goal statement.
00:08:36
So what are the overall regional
00:08:38
goals and fine-tuning the objectives which would then really be essential to developing the performance measures needed to score needs and projects.
00:08:48
We also wanted to have these groups be ambassadors to the process so that when the survey came out later on they could help us distribute that survey out to folks.
00:08:59
Next up we had the virtual public meeting that was on June 20th, so a little bit later on the calendar.
00:09:08
after we really processed the stakeholder meetings.
00:09:12
Staff presented this, had some good attendance.
00:09:15
Really, the intention here was to inform them on the process and also kind of prep the community for the next few engagement steps here with the open house, which happened right here in this room.
00:09:29
So that was on June 21st.
00:09:32
Had a series of maps lined up in the room here.
00:09:35
The real focus was to provide feedback on those goals, objectives, identifying transportation needs.
00:09:43
There's a big map we could mark those needs on here.
00:09:46
And just trying to identify what are the main community concerns.
00:09:51
That's a good step early in an engagement process.
00:09:57
With the open house, there was kind of information there of the upcoming survey that was coming out that got launched in July.
00:10:07
Again, there's been a lot of surveys out there.
00:10:10
So you kind of you only have people only take but so many surveys.
00:10:15
And a lot of the folks who are really tuned in on transportation had gotten hit by a few earlier.
00:10:21
But I think we got we got good.
00:10:24
I think good numbers here.
00:10:26
It was over 300 responses.
00:10:29
There was a map where you could mark on the map specific locations and concerns and issues.
00:10:34
They got over 1100 comments on that, which are going to be really important because you can turn those comments into basically heat maps and overlay projects and transportation needs over top of that and really get good information on those next steps here.
00:10:53
Again, objectives here were to review those goals, objectives, kind of influence the weighting of performance measures, which is coming up next in the process and identifying those concerns.
00:11:09
I will say also on distribution, staff reached out to the stakeholder groups, reached out
00:11:16
the neighborhoods, other community groups and really tried to work with existing social networks in the region and just really was pushing that data out.
00:11:27
We developed a social media campaign using all the different social media platforms out there to really push that survey out, send information to local media.
00:11:39
We kind of had a checklist of everything we could possibly do to really push that survey out and went through that list a couple times.
00:11:45
So really try to put a big effort into that.
00:11:50
In terms of public intercepts, staff also went out to, there was the National Night Out
00:11:57
presence in both of those.
00:11:59
Staff was at the transit center and had a table lined up and wanted to reach out to folks there at the transit center.
00:12:05
There are also presentations at the Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority.
00:12:09
They have regular meetings with residents there and staff was there at those meetings to get feedback, concerns.
00:12:17
other issues and help report that as well.
00:12:21
But I would say also the survey, I think we had we had good response.
00:12:26
Looking at the results and Alan will go over this to just want to make sure that it was representative.
00:12:31
So we had good response, but we just wanted to get a little bit more diversity here in our responses.
00:12:37
So we're going to go a few extra steps here of reaching out to the community directly.
00:12:44
I will say this one right here, Curtis was in one location, Sandy and I were here at the Ix Park and I think had really great conversations with a lot of folks in the community with public intercepts it gives you the opportunity to have a good dialogue with people in the community which is something you don't get in a survey so we get some of that what you might call deep data from those discussions.
00:13:07
Sandy has been meeting with the community advisory committees in Albemarle County.
00:13:13
It's been working through those meetings, having a presence there and going through the plan.
00:13:20
Again, another part of this is trying to build that relationship with existing groups to try to get information out like surveys, other public engagement opportunities, and really get the word out through those existing groups.
SPEAKER_05
00:13:35
I don't know if we'll reach back out to the CACs in this way through the other round.
00:13:47
It was pretty time-extensive, but we will try to coordinate to make sure that they have the opportunity to follow up.
00:13:54
We'll work with Albemarle County staff.
00:13:56
Sometimes they do combined CAC meetings, so if there's an opportunity to just put the information in front of them, we will.
SPEAKER_08
00:14:06
No, it was pretty good.
SPEAKER_05
00:14:13
I think the lowest one that we had was maybe seven or eight, but there were several of them that had more than 20 people at them.
00:14:20
And it wasn't just the CAC members.
00:14:22
Crozet, especially, if I recall, had a lot of the public that was there, as well as the Places 29 hydraulic.
SPEAKER_07
00:14:34
I mentioned that there's been a lot of other planning processes going on.
00:14:38
That can be challenging to kind of muscle in to get engagement with the community when there's so many surveys, so many other engagement out there, especially the challenge of working on the long-range planning.
00:14:51
It's a little bit harder here.
00:14:54
What we're doing with staff is going through these other processes.
00:14:58
Since they do exist, they are valid, there has been a lot of dialogue with the community already on these other efforts.
00:15:05
So it really went through public engagement results from the comp plan, the comp plan, business plan, other documents we defined, found the public engagement we could there, and pulled it all over into a large spreadsheet where we're documenting those comments and including those comments in the analysis.
00:15:23
that that's a good way to know some of these processes are happening now with the comp plan or happened just recently they're still valid it's been a lot of the same questions in these efforts so why not pull them in and have that be part of that dialogue so that's also been part of the analysis
00:15:42
Staff launched an online project website back last year.
00:15:47
So that's been up and running.
00:15:48
And then I know Alan, who's joining virtually put together story maps, which is really intended to be more of a virtual version of the open house where you can actually go through the maps, interact with them and turn layers off and on and provide feedback that way as well.
00:16:07
As I mentioned, we did have social media presence and just trying to hit
00:16:11
you know as much the kind of that social media side whenever there's something coming up especially with the survey or meetings and try to use best practices with the different platforms.
SPEAKER_08
00:16:21
I officially had to change the Twitter logo out with X. I guess that's what we're following it now.
00:16:30
Had to?
00:16:32
I don't think had to.
SPEAKER_07
00:16:34
I don't know what the rules are now.
00:16:37
So just
00:16:40
real quick on the engagement report and Alan's going to get into some preliminary findings here which is more interesting here but at the end of this month we're going to have a full report of all the engagement and it's going to give a summary of each engagement approach channel that we used and what we found.
00:16:59
There were some kind of interesting results where
00:17:03
as the main priority on the survey might have been a little different than the priorities we saw with the public intercepts at the transit center and so forth.
00:17:11
So that's going to be interesting to really lay that out and figure out what do we do when there's some sort of disagreement here from these different areas.
00:17:20
So we'll talk about that.
00:17:23
We do want the engagement report, which you'll see soon.
00:17:26
We're actually almost done with it, but
00:17:30
that can serve as the engagement chapter in the plan.
00:17:33
So it's nice to start to create material for the plan document itself.
00:17:37
And certainly it's going to be filling up the appendix part of the engagement too.
00:17:43
And then on the back half of the report, it lays out specifically, how exactly are we going to use these comments in the process?
00:17:52
And that goes back to having a meaningful process where whatever we're collecting, we want to maintain trust with the community.
00:17:58
So if we ask a question,
00:18:00
means we have an intention to actually use the answer here and show how that actually influences the process.
00:18:09
In terms of function, the report could be a standalone document which will live online.
00:18:14
We hope that that will show the community that we've collected the feedback correctly and we're presenting it back to them and validating that.
00:18:23
Again, it can also be elements of the final document as well.
00:18:27
So it's always nice to start to create their content as you go along.
00:18:34
In terms of outcomes, really that public engagement of everything we've collected, the questions, the surveys, the discussions, the scripts on those conversations, everything was really designed to address these four areas of
00:18:50
getting public feedback on how to weight the performance measures, so the goals, objectives, and how that's going to influence the prioritization of needs, as well as how that prioritizes projects when we get into this next step coming up.
00:19:05
We also influence project selection directly, so we're going to map all comments, put the projects on there,
00:19:12
there's a project that's kind of on the fence between the vision list and the constraint list you know if you get a lot of public support for it then that kind of kind of moves it around kind of those thresholds on those points if we have a lot of comments on a project that that could potentially influence the design of that project or an approach I think also just looking into the future for future long-range plan updates
00:19:37
There's going to be some gap needs where there's a need identified but there's not specifically a project assigned to that need to address it.
00:19:46
So getting from the community kind of what are their preferred approaches here and studies being done that it's those studies that future work on identifying projects, developing projects are aligned with the community's vision here of what is their preferred way of addressing travel needs.
00:20:05
So that was, I want to hand it over to Alan.
00:20:08
Hopefully Alan can hear us okay.
00:20:12
I'm going to advance the slides for you.
SPEAKER_01
00:20:14
Cool.
00:20:15
Can you guys hear me?
SPEAKER_07
00:20:17
Yes.
SPEAKER_01
00:20:17
Great.
00:20:19
All right.
00:20:19
So as Will mentioned, we're working on an engagement report that I'm putting together.
00:20:24
So we're going to have that done by the end of the month, but we wanted to kind of go over some initial findings and what we're seeing so far from all these engagement efforts.
00:20:33
First, we had a lot of open-ended comments from the in-person efforts for the Moving Toward 2050 plan, as well as past engagement efforts, all put into a spreadsheet that I went through and coded.
00:20:47
So we use the following categories.
00:20:48
This just kind of came up naturally as I was going through the comments.
00:20:51
So safety, efficiency, connections, multimodal improvements or needs, land use concerns, economy, and everything else.
00:21:02
So the report's going to tie these categories into the plan's goals.
00:21:07
So for example, a lot of the comments that were categorized as other were about the environment.
00:21:12
So we'll probably make a new category there for those.
00:21:16
Connections, a lot of times that was related to equity, accessibility.
00:21:21
So we'll make sure that these comments kind of tie into the goals and, you know, how it all relates.
00:21:27
So we'll have more detailed analysis of these comments in the engagement report.
00:21:31
And then I'm going to show some graphs here in the next couple of slides.
00:21:33
But note that a lot of these comments fell into more than one category.
00:21:36
So the counts you're going to see on these graphs, they're higher than the actual number of comments we got because a lot of times, you know, safety, multimodal connections, you know, one comment covered all three of those categories.
00:21:48
So, Will, if you want to advance to the next slide.
00:21:52
So first, this is how the in-person engagement efforts broke down.
00:21:58
So
00:21:59
everything that's been done in person for the Moving Toward 2050 plan.
00:22:03
So multimodal concerns dominated the themes of these comments.
00:22:09
So people really were concerned about bike access, pedestrian access, public transit.
00:22:16
That all falls into the multimodal category.
00:22:20
Safety was second, but you know,
00:22:23
quite a bit lower than the multimodal concern.
00:22:25
And that's kind of a theme we've seen in these comments.
00:22:28
We kind of expected to see a little bit more emphasis on safety, but, you know, multimodal comments would range from, you know, we need a bike lane here for better access to, we need a bike lane here because it's dangerous for biking.
00:22:43
We need a protected bike lane.
00:22:45
So I kind of tried to split those out.
00:22:47
If it was explicitly about safety, I mentioned it there.
00:22:50
And then you've got efficiency, so that's mostly related to traffic congestion, the efficiency of bus schedules, that kind of thing.
00:22:59
Connections, that's anything from the need for sidewalks to more bus routes.
00:23:05
A handful of comments that were explicitly about land use, zoning concerns, that kind of thing.
00:23:12
Anything that was related to parking, specifically when under land use.
00:23:16
And then 55 comments in the other categories.
00:23:19
So that kind of suggests we need to kind of break those out into other other categories, but environmental concerns really dominated the the other category.
00:23:28
And you want to move to the next slide.
00:23:29
So compare that to the Albemarle County comp plan update.
00:23:35
Land use was by far the most dominant category here and
00:23:40
A lot of these comments were talking about a need or a desire to preserve rural space, concerns about growth, that kind of thing.
00:23:50
But there were also a lot of comments about public transit.
00:23:53
So a lot of the multimodal comments you see here were about the need for more bus routes coming out to the county.
00:24:01
that kind of thing.
00:24:02
Efficiency, most of that was about traffic congestion and the concerns about increased congestion if there's future growth in the county.
00:24:10
The other categories didn't really show up too much.
00:24:15
The SEVO plans together survey.
00:24:17
Multimodal concerns dominated that one again.
00:24:19
A lot of discussion about bike lanes, sidewalks, bus routes, that kind of thing.
00:24:27
By far the most common comment we heard there.
00:24:29
Everything else kind of
00:24:31
All the other comments were fairly even down there at the bottom.
00:24:34
But yeah, that one was absolutely dominated by bike lanes, bus routes, that kind of thing.
00:24:42
And the Regional Transit Vision, again, pretty similar to the Seville Plans Together survey.
00:24:48
You know, this was about the whole region, though.
00:24:49
So again, multimodal concerns were at the top.
00:24:54
Other
00:24:55
that kind of suggests that we need to break those comments out again into more specific categories.
00:24:59
But again, those are mostly about the environment, that kind of thing.
00:25:03
So yeah, we saw a little bit of variation in the different, you know, the different public engagement methods here.
00:25:10
The Albemarle one was the one that stuck out the most to me about about land use and zoning concerns.
00:25:16
But in general, there's a lot of discussion about
00:25:20
the need for more transit routes and bike lanes, sidewalks, pedestrian facilities, that kind of thing in all of the surveys.
00:25:30
So the MetroQuest survey.
00:25:31
So we're gonna go over a little overview of what we saw there.
00:25:36
We only had a handful of open-ended comments.
00:25:38
The slides, the previous slides were all just open-ended comments received from those engagement efforts, but this one was a little bit more targeted or a lot more targeted.
00:25:47
So we have 334 survey participants
00:25:50
We had about just a handful of open-ended comments, but we'll address those in the engagement report.
00:25:57
So the next slides are going to go over kind of the breakdown of the responses we heard.
00:26:00
I'm also going to go over a couple of maps because we got 1,100 comments on the mapping portion of this.
00:26:07
So the first question in this survey is about ranking priorities.
00:26:11
What was most important to people in terms of transportation needs?
00:26:15
This one we did see a high number of comments related to safety.
00:26:20
So that was the highest ranking topic.
00:26:24
Environmental concerns were second.
00:26:26
Multibodal accessibility was third.
00:26:29
Land use and efficiency and economic development were both tied for last place.
00:26:34
So you see a little difference here between this and the other engagement efforts.
00:26:40
So that was a little interesting to me.
00:26:42
Move to the next slide.
00:26:44
So the next question here, the next three questions were about trade-offs.
00:26:50
Apologies if you guys have already seen the survey and know this, but I put the questions in here, screenshots from the survey, so you know what we're talking about here.
00:26:57
So the first question was about balancing the priority between roadway improvement and multimodal system improvements.
00:27:06
The graph over here to the right, if people wanted to see more roadway improvements, they were voting to the left.
00:27:13
So far left, left neutral, depending on how strongly they felt about that.
00:27:18
And if you wanted to see more multiple modes of transportation, you'd be voting more to the right.
00:27:23
So the far right was definitely the most common response here.
00:27:29
So prioritizing multiple modes of transportation.
00:27:33
That's a pretty clear result to me.
00:27:36
Access trade-offs.
00:27:37
This one was pretty evenly distributed.
00:27:38
A lot of people were pretty neutral about this.
00:27:42
But there was a lot of neutral, and then the next was kind of a tendency to want access to jobs.
00:27:48
But so this question was about, you know, should transportation projects be more about getting people to work or getting them anywhere else?
00:27:55
So fairly even distribution, maybe slightly tilted towards jobs, but it's a pretty even breakdown here.
00:28:08
yeah yeah I think so yeah it's a pretty even breakdown and the last question for trade-offs here was about climate concerns so this was basically asking are you more concerned about traffic or you were concerned about active public transportation in terms of which do you think would be better for meeting climate goals and
00:28:31
Active and public transportation definitely seemed to win out here.
00:28:35
But there was still some sentiment for congestion reduction.
00:28:38
And these were kind of tied hand, they're related issues.
00:28:43
But yeah, that was how that one broke down.
00:28:48
The next few we're gonna go over, these are just some very high level maps.
00:28:52
They might be a little hard to read.
00:28:53
The engagement report is gonna go into more detail with these.
00:28:56
I'm gonna kind of zoom into some of these
00:28:59
you know, areas where we're seeing a lot of comments.
00:29:01
So every marker here you see is where someone left a comment where they wanted to see an improvement in public transit, bus stops and bus routes.
00:29:10
So we're seeing up 29 up to the airport.
00:29:14
A lot of comments there all throughout Charlottesville.
00:29:17
Obviously we're seeing a lot there.
00:29:20
Crozet, we have a lot of comments and then we have a few more spread throughout the region.
00:29:24
So yeah, in the engagement report it will go into a little bit more
00:29:29
micro detail on these areas and highlight hotspots.
00:29:34
Probably add some heat maps as well.
00:29:37
Bike and ped.
00:29:39
Here we're seeing distributed all over the region.
00:29:42
A lot in Crozet on Park looking for bike and ped improvements.
00:29:49
West Main Street in Charlottesville is a hotspot there.
00:29:53
And then throughout Charlottesville and throughout the region
00:29:56
plenty of other locations where people were looking for bike and ped improvements.
00:30:00
Up 29, you see that as well, a little hotspot there.
00:30:02
So again, we'll go into a little more detail in the engagement report, but that's the overview of those improvements.
00:30:10
Roadway improvements.
00:30:11
A lot of these were about intersections.
00:30:14
I think that was the dominant theme when people categorized the comment as a roadway improvement.
00:30:19
A lot of concern about intersection improvements and anything that kind of didn't
00:30:25
directly fall under like a bike pad improvement or a transit improvement.
00:30:32
Concerns about the quality of the road, number of lanes, that kind of thing.
00:30:38
But intersections and intersection safety is probably the dominant theme here.
00:30:45
Next slide.
00:30:47
And finally, these were all comments related to safety.
00:30:50
So again, you know, this map, I don't know how much you can get from this map.
00:30:55
I think it's going to be more useful in the report when we kind of zoom in on the hotspots here.
00:31:01
But, you know, Preston Avenue in Charlottesville, Fifth Street, West Main Street, a lot of roads in Crozet had a lot of markers in there.
00:31:12
So plenty to look at in the engagement report with this one.
00:31:20
For the survey, we also had kind of some demographic questions.
00:31:25
The majority of people who took the survey drive alone as their primary form of transportation.
00:31:30
And then biking came second, walking, carpool around nine, seven percent.
00:31:36
Four percent of people took the bus or other forms of transit and then everything else kind of zero to one percent.
00:31:42
So mostly car drivers, but a good chunk of bikers and people who use other forms of transit.
00:31:50
Race, the breakdown for race, 77% was white or Caucasian, 14% preferred not to answer or other, and then all other races are about one to 2%.
00:32:00
So the breakdown there was mostly white and not a ton of representation from other races in the survey.
00:32:13
For age, pretty even breakdown, 35 to 44 was the dominant category.
00:32:19
followed by 65 and older and then pretty even breakdown for the rest.
00:32:24
No one under 18 for the survey.
00:32:29
And household income, again, pretty even split.
00:32:33
This goes clockwise in terms of the legends.
00:32:35
It might be a little hard to make out those colors, but yeah, pretty even split in terms of income.
00:32:42
Not a ton of low-income respondents.
00:32:47
The majority of respondents were above the $50,000 household income mark.
00:32:53
That's how the online survey broke down.
00:32:57
And then gender identity.
00:32:59
Skewed male, 43% female.
00:33:04
8% prefer not to answer and then zero to 1% transgender or nonconforming or non-binary.
00:33:12
So that was the breakdown of the initial results of what we saw from all these engagement efforts.
00:33:18
I think, so the next step is for the next week or so, I'm gonna be going through everything and finishing up the report and going into more detail and kind of gleaning some insights from all these results.
SPEAKER_07
00:33:33
And just to add again to what Alan was showing with the representation, as part of when we looked at that, then we decided, you know, let's take some additional steps to get some more of that diversity in there.
SPEAKER_01
00:33:45
Exactly.
SPEAKER_07
00:33:45
You know, I think pretty good spread on the income side.
00:33:49
Ray's side, we did want to reach out, so went to the transit center, had the public intercepts, you know, went to other meetings to try to get that.
00:34:00
In terms of, next up, last slide here, I'm going to have the full engagement plan wrapped up by the end of this month.
00:34:08
Also looking at the finalized awaiting for the performance measures, and that's, I know, coming up, I think, on your agenda here in October.
00:34:16
Starting to share the candidate project list, I know that we're pulling together all the candidate project lists with a little bit more information than what would be normally shared through just a spreadsheet.
00:34:29
A little bit more to look at there as well as a map of all those in the region of just sort of all the projects that have been studied and documented in the region that we're evaluating.
00:34:39
Working to identify high priority needs and so really pulling from the gap process that was done earlier and trying to identify and prioritize the travel needs in the region.
00:34:51
then beginning to pare down that candidate project list because there's a ton of transportation projects in the region.
00:35:00
Can't score all of them there, so really trying to pare it down to what are the most effective projects to address the needs that have been identified.
00:35:09
and we did have a few questions but just to kind of get discussion going certainly want to see what your takeaways were if you saw anything interesting or counter to what you were thinking there.
00:35:24
We did have the question too of we can look at these things like the survey, the public intercepts of these different channels
00:35:33
and look at them independently, or we can put them basically average them all together into one consideration.
00:35:39
So if we put them all together, then how staff really weighs the performance measures and goals to kind of be an aggregate of all feedback.
00:35:50
if we keep them a little separate.
00:35:52
Now granted, some of the engagement we did was to try to get more representation, more diversity here, whether we kind of keep those separate and try to consider those as we're looking through the process.
00:36:04
So just philosophical approaches there, but did want to first see if there's any major takeaways as you all saw.
SPEAKER_08
00:36:20
So you mentioned diversity and so what's done to try to achieve more diversity?
00:36:26
Because when I look at research from a race standpoint there wasn't much.
00:36:30
Can you go back to the income chart?
SPEAKER_05
00:36:36
Do you want me to respond to that one or do you want to?
00:36:41
One of the things that we did was try to work with organizations that specifically have relationships with some of those communities.
00:36:49
So that was one of the reasons we went to the transit centers, and also we worked with the CRHA.
00:36:56
They have their regular planning meetings with
00:37:01
different communities throughout throughout the city of Charlottesville.
00:37:05
So we did conduct some outreach with them.
00:37:07
And then we also had we also had some of those representatives like PHA, for example, the Piedmont Housing
00:37:17
group, we had those on our stakeholder committee.
00:37:19
So we had those engaged, we had some of those organizations that work with some of these more vulnerable communities at the table right from the very beginning to build into the process.
00:37:31
So the challenge is that we're not going to be able to necessarily reflect the demographics of the people we talk to in person, but we did make a really specific effort to make sure that our outreach was targeting
00:37:44
kind of areas or organizations where those perspectives would be represented.
SPEAKER_08
00:37:49
Yeah, I appreciate those efforts to try to get more involvement, but it's really not represented at all.
00:37:57
So both in the race and then when I, and I'm sorry, I can't really, my eyes are, I can't really make out all those colors, but it would be great if you had a line on the median household income.
00:38:12
venture to guess from just a number of different colors that I can't see is that you're well above the medium on more than 60% and 70% of the respondents.
00:38:24
Of course.
00:38:25
And that's not even getting to low income, but if you just have the medium, so that's
00:38:46
So this is from the survey portion which is what triggered those additional actions and the survey was roughly probably half of all people engaged but certainly sitting at the transit center national night out the
SPEAKER_07
00:39:15
CRHA meetings, the stakeholder groups.
00:39:21
It's really difficult to collect this data if you're talking to 100 or more folks at events to also collect their income.
00:39:29
They're just not going to really provide that in that format.
00:39:34
So part of this year was just to show what the survey kind of
00:39:40
composition was, and then how that triggered us to do these other next steps.
00:39:45
Unfortunately, we just don't have much of a way to document, raise our income.
00:39:50
And we certainly weren't going to try to eyeball that.
00:39:53
I mean, that's not something we can do.
00:39:56
So yeah, it's unfortunate we can't get all that data.
00:40:00
But this was probably about half of the thing was over 600 people engaged.
00:40:05
We had about a little over 300 on the survey.
00:40:06
So
SPEAKER_05
00:40:12
One of the things we could do, we can't put everything on a graph like this, but one of the things we could do is maybe try to sort of, especially the areas that we're focusing on filling some of these demographic gaps to talk about who maybe like the average
00:40:30
you know, person that is served by those organizations or services.
00:40:36
Maybe just to sort of try to highlight that a little bit better.
SPEAKER_08
00:40:39
Yeah, I think that would be a good depiction of this case.
00:40:44
There's a large area which are probably the most eligible photos of the ones that we're, from a fancy standpoint, Albemarle, the ones that we really want to look at while we're looking out for enough resources.
00:41:00
and I guess you might be reaching out and you are reaching out, but it's just not such a challenge.
00:41:06
You might want to think about how you captivate it.
00:41:09
There are ways to do it.
00:41:15
As they're coming in, there are ways to get their name through a range of income groups.
SPEAKER_05
00:41:37
It was really a variety of ways.
00:41:38
So we had, a lot of it was just inviting people to, we had a poster that showed our goals, we had some maps that were available, and we had to try to capture the waiting, like where we were having tables and were set up in one place.
00:41:55
We had an opportunity for people, we would give them
00:41:59
pretend transportation money and ask them how they would divvy it up between the goals and objectives.
00:42:04
And then it was just like open feedback, like tell us what you think about the transportation system.
00:42:08
So it was very, very open.
00:42:10
And it was based on them either filling out a comment card or telling it to us directly.
00:42:14
Now for the places where we, like the CAC meetings, for example, were just meetings that we attended.
00:42:22
And this was really us just having a discussion and me saying, you know,
00:42:26
This is an overview of the long-range transportation plan.
00:42:28
What are your top transportation priorities?
00:42:31
That was basically the prompt.
00:42:33
The second prompt that I had at the very end was just this stream of consciousness idea.
00:42:39
What is the first thing that you think of when we say, in order to improve the transportation system, we need to focus on?
00:42:44
You just kind of let them know, which sort of helped us understand what their framework was for the feedback that they were providing.
SPEAKER_08
00:42:51
I think seeing a priority and immersing people
SPEAKER_07
00:42:59
The in-person were, they were a little bit more focused on the multi-modal side and the survey was a little more focused on the safety side.
00:43:07
And with the in-person discussions, we did try to mimic the survey as much as we could.
00:43:13
So we did have maps that were printed out and we tried to kind of talk about where do you live and kind of where can we, what are the areas around here and went through those.
00:43:24
and then had the money game kind of exercise that we had with them.
00:43:28
So we tried to really, we couldn't, the trade-off side was one part of the survey we couldn't hit so well.
00:43:36
But I think we had pretty good kind of success with the in-person at the public events.
00:43:43
We averaged like maybe 10 people an hour, which was pretty good.
00:43:46
When you look at the national night out at the transit center, kind of those discussions.
SPEAKER_08
00:43:56
So when we're looking at the Harvard media presenting here, like the maps, are those in-person interactions reflected in those?
SPEAKER_05
00:44:04
Not yet.
00:44:06
This is just the MetroQuest survey and I believe that was part of what we were going to do is be combining, combine the public intercept feedback that was location specific into the map as well.
SPEAKER_07
00:44:18
Yep.
00:44:20
So we were taking
00:44:22
we have a database where we have all comments and we put all comments from all areas and put them all together so that's kind of part of part of the analysis and then also just kind of within this process of all the surveys and then any in-person discussions if someone mentioned a location that turns into a data point yeah right now the maps just show the stuff from MetroQuest but I'm going through the the comment log and
SPEAKER_01
00:44:51
noting anything that has a specific location and I'll add a data point for that.
SPEAKER_08
00:45:40
again what we heard last we've been in and out of the program is changes to the campus on a scale scoring and how we're going to square that day as we develop our part in the project.
00:46:02
So this is a challenge.
SPEAKER_08
00:46:10
Yes
SPEAKER_05
00:46:32
Localities will still be able to apply for the smaller bike projects as well.
00:46:38
The challenge is that they might not explore as competitively as they had previously.
SPEAKER_08
00:47:06
How do you see taking the points that we're going to get from
00:47:26
different individuals are filling out a survey and of course they're looking at it from the perspective of where they live or where they commute to probably what they see and you know they would like to push up.
00:47:37
How does that work into a more integrated system?
00:47:40
I think that's one thing that the community can benefit from is having a more
SPEAKER_07
00:48:02
Well, I mean, we have all the kind of the attribute data, the specific wording that people use when they place the dot, not only in the survey, but also verbally.
00:48:12
So we've got points on maps, but it's actually more than that, too, because we can look into it and see what specifically are they saying about that point.
00:48:21
we're coding and we can break that data out into different areas.
00:48:28
In terms of kind of more system regional bike pedestrian plan, I mean, that's kind of the same information you'd collect with a bike ped plan too.
00:48:38
So that can kind of feed into whatever efforts in the future might go towards that.
00:48:46
I think for the purposes of the longer transportation plan,
00:48:49
One is we typically will take those points on the map and we'll overlay it with kind of the needs that have been identified on the map.
00:48:58
So we can verify and look at what the data tells us.
00:49:04
The secondary data is the public engagement.
00:49:07
Does that align well with the secondary data of what that tells us that these are?
00:49:13
And if they perfectly overlap, that's great.
00:49:15
And that validates what the data is telling us.
00:49:19
If there's some areas that are kind of popping up that the data isn't showing us, then that kind of triggers a few other actions of, is there something else going on here that the data just isn't capturing here?
00:49:32
Because data is great, but it doesn't always capture everything.
00:49:36
So maybe there's some other issue here that requires some primary data collection, maybe looking at the site and seeing if there's something else here that's being missed from the B-Trans set of data.
00:49:49
I think the other part of it, too, is, you know, if there is kind of a hotspot with the public comments that hasn't been identified yet, there's not a project and there's not an identified need yet in place, then the MPO can use that to help develop a TPWP and say, these are some locations that are really high concern locations.
00:50:08
Maybe there's data here supporting that.
00:50:10
kind of to set up of we need to develop, we need to study these areas.
00:50:15
There might be some strong preferences put in place where here's a corridor.
00:50:18
It's a big concern.
00:50:21
We want multimodal approaches here on this corridor.
00:50:24
So that might be kind of the trigger of we should study this here and look at how multimodal approaches here on this segment here.
00:50:33
Really the way this long-range transportation plan has always been set up is
00:50:38
It's typically taking projects that have already been identified and studied through VDOT and other processes and it's scoring those projects and going through.
00:50:48
And if there's any issues or hotspots where there's not a project already identified, then that kind of
00:50:55
comes up for the next five-year update of here's an issue, we need to develop something for this area.
00:51:01
Because developing a project, obviously that's a whole other process that is kind of, aside from the lottery transportation plan, at least kind of the tradition of how this region, most MPOs in Virginia approach that.
00:51:15
So I think it's going to be helpful in that regard.
00:51:19
We're going to hand everything over to the MPOs.
00:51:21
They should have a whole database of all comments and all locations, all points, and you can track and analyze it any number of ways.
SPEAKER_08
00:51:28
Did you find any of those places, as you move from data now, that's going to stand out to you, that disconnects, or anything like that?
SPEAKER_07
00:51:35
Yeah, that's what Alan's working on right now.
00:51:36
So that's being processed, because we don't know these kind of things.
00:51:40
Yeah.
00:51:41
And part of the limitations of the slides we're showing now is just kind of what we have so far.
00:51:48
These are just little bits and pieces of what's been gathered so far, but kind of the full report has all the breakdowns and more of the actual analysis.
00:51:57
This is just kind of a scattershot here of just what we can produce for today.
00:52:03
I usually follow that up.
SPEAKER_08
00:52:05
You know, we may end up finding and work to prioritize and stuff.
SPEAKER_06
00:52:11
You may have a community that
00:52:15
Oh, yeah.
00:52:16
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_05
00:52:32
Well, yeah, I think I just want to reiterate Will's point before, like the projects that are developed are being developed through small area plans and corridor studies and things like that.
00:52:42
So the projects themselves should have been developed with, you know, some sort of larger context in mind.
00:52:49
And the other thing I want to emphasize is that we are also not developing these recommendations without being in close consultation with the localities, because I don't want to necessarily say as a region, these are our priorities.
00:53:00
if those are completely kind of you know different than maybe what where the localities are planning to go through their comprehensive network process.
00:53:09
So again you know we've been talking like like this helps gives us information to start making decisions but this isn't the only information and there's still going to be a lot of a qualitative evaluation as we really determine what makes sense as far as a priority.
SPEAKER_08
00:53:34
because in terms of the survey was was definitely skewed more on no
SPEAKER_07
00:54:03
We had a range but certainly higher income, a little less diversity on that front.
00:54:08
The public intercepts kind of kicked in in order to try to get more kind of equity, kind of hit different income ranges.
00:54:18
So those are going to be kind of more on that end.
00:54:22
We talked about just combining those data sets into one and we're just analyzing basically the sum of those data sets.
00:54:29
another approach is to keep them separate and say this is what we heard in this set and this is what we heard in this set and let's kind of treat these to balance kind of balance them together here so that they're pretty split I mean you know the survey was probably almost half of what people engaged here so they're both kind of larger data sets but any I guess any thoughts on that of kind of if you put them together then one can kind of kind of
00:54:59
So based on what you said earlier about
SPEAKER_08
00:55:28
Yeah, multimodal tended to be mostly about
SPEAKER_01
00:55:58
transit, or biking.
00:56:01
I put sidewalks and things like that tended to go more in the connections area.
00:56:05
Multimodal was mostly focused on like transit, bike facilities, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_08
00:56:11
So do we know if they were focused more on community transit so we can get a place for bike transit?
SPEAKER_01
00:56:21
Yeah, it depends on where the comments were.
00:56:24
And that's something that I should probably look at in a little more detail and kind of break out
00:56:28
in the final report.
00:56:29
And I will do that.
00:56:31
But multimodal was kind of a catch all for anything related to that.
SPEAKER_07
00:56:39
There's some other variables here that can introduce bias.
00:56:42
And one of them is we just went through a transit vision planning process and we did have a lot of involvement on that.
00:56:49
This survey could be a little under-counted because if you just took a survey and then the MPO is sending out another survey, then maybe they didn't take it.
00:56:57
There might be some self-selection bias here too.
00:57:00
We try to do as much as we could to try to eliminate as much bias as possible.
00:57:06
That's impossible to eliminate it completely.
00:57:10
I did want to acknowledge that there could be kind of a little undercount on the transit side because there has been so much transit surveying done recently.
00:57:21
So we are looking at the transit vision plan, trying to pull that in here as well and have that be part of the data set, but just something to be aware of.
SPEAKER_02
00:57:28
And we're doing our transit survey currently, so sorry.
SPEAKER_07
00:57:32
Yes, it's okay.
00:57:33
We should just have hope.
SPEAKER_10
00:57:36
Transit pilot, I think there's one.
SPEAKER_07
00:57:39
you just have a one regional survey but yeah so I'm gonna guess that the survey is gonna that there are some self selection biases here which is something we just want to document any other possible biases we just want to document it have it in the report just so that transparency
SPEAKER_05
00:58:02
Yeah, it's also kind of interesting because when we did the public intercepts, people felt like they needed to explain their choices to us versus the survey.
00:58:09
People might have felt a little bit more freedom to just...
SPEAKER_07
00:58:26
We didn't, not that I know of, we did do another survey though for a different community and there were tons of responses from other countries so we can track the IP addresses.
SPEAKER_05
00:58:39
I am getting those from our like comment form online though.
SPEAKER_08
00:58:42
Yeah, we had such a bad one, the RTSP survey, it was like 3,500 responses but only half percent of them were really.
00:58:50
So that's something we're paying pretty close attention to now.
SPEAKER_07
00:58:55
Yeah, we can track IP addresses on there.
00:58:58
And then also we look at the timestamps to try to track.
00:59:01
So if it's like a hundred came in, like between 2 AM and 2.05, then that's kind of weird.
SPEAKER_01
00:59:09
Yeah.
00:59:11
I was going to start, I was going to say everything on the comment log, nothing looked fishy with the IP addresses or anything.
SPEAKER_08
00:59:18
I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_07
00:59:26
in terms of how long it's been, it's out there that it's open.
00:59:29
How long would it take an individual?
00:59:32
Oh, an individual.
00:59:33
This one, Alan, do you have the average response time?
SPEAKER_01
00:59:37
Yeah, it looks like it was around 10 minutes.
00:59:41
Anywhere from five to 10 minutes.
SPEAKER_05
00:59:44
And probably a lot of that was the mapping.
00:59:45
There were 334 respondents that we got over a lot of app comments.
00:59:49
So that's probably where people are spending their time.
SPEAKER_08
00:59:54
We also made postcards, so we handed those out to people in person
SPEAKER_07
01:00:21
You could write comments and hand the postcard in, but there's also a QR code for the for the survey.
01:00:28
So we did ask people to take the survey.
01:00:31
I think we saw a tiny bump.
SPEAKER_08
01:00:36
Like right, like right after the intercept is like a little blip.
01:00:40
But yeah.
SPEAKER_05
01:00:49
Thank you.
01:00:50
Thank you to Will and Alan and I'm sure we're all looking forward to seeing the more detailed analysis.
SPEAKER_08
01:00:57
Thank you.
SPEAKER_07
01:00:59
And Will, Alan and I got some your comments here.
01:01:02
So we're going to make a few adjustments on the report.
01:01:06
If you have any more thoughts of something you'd like to see in terms of the analysis, please let us know.
01:01:11
because with any data set, you can show it any number of ways.
01:01:14
So we want to make sure that it's consistent with MPO's expectations.
SPEAKER_09
01:01:23
All right.
01:01:33
Next up, we have media updates.
01:01:42
Alright, go ahead.
SPEAKER_08
01:01:44
Yeah, inclusion in your packet was a set of adjustments that you got to include.
01:01:55
This is an informational item.
SPEAKER_09
01:01:59
Basically it's moving money from FY23 to FY24.
01:02:16
Do you have any questions about it?
01:02:18
Any bridges going to collapse because we waited to maintain them?
SPEAKER_05
01:02:39
Do you have a presentation, Michael?
SPEAKER_08
01:02:41
I don't have a presentation, per se.
01:02:43
We're moving forward with three pipeline projects in the community.
01:02:48
We actually have a meeting scheduled on Friday.
01:02:53
We will report back to you what the plans have been so far on Eric's earlier project.
01:03:00
We're still working on the Ivan Rojek, our consultant, so he came back and gave us an internal presentation.
01:03:06
So hopefully we can come back with an invite to that meeting, which we'd like to.
01:03:16
We'll finally write down, I mean obviously they're assessing crash and congestion down along Bexford's corridor.
01:03:26
I think what we need to talk about is especially medians, closures potentially in certain places along the corridor, what types of future improvements might be considered in the corridor.
01:03:45
Barrett Road Corps was a very tough place to try to do something.
01:03:48
A lot of infrastructure, a lot of built environment right up on the road there.
01:03:55
And getting underneath the bypass is a tough nut to crack.
01:04:00
There's not a lot of room for facilities.
01:04:02
There are, of course, some existing sidewalks out there.
01:04:06
And we found some sidewalks and places.
01:04:08
Again, there's a couple of utility poles that are not being required.
01:04:11
Some of them are not in the best conditions.
01:04:15
using ADA lamps.
01:04:17
There are some conflicts with pedestrian movements in the interchange itself.
01:04:25
There's permissive yellows for electric traffic, and so that creates conflicts with pedestrians who are walking along there.
01:04:33
A relatively easy, easy fix.
01:04:37
But I think trying to get a charity's path out there is going to be a good way to challenge this.
01:04:44
significant pushback on that from folks in town who are B-Home buybacks.
01:04:51
And how we figure out solutions to that is going to be interesting.
01:04:57
Some of the solutions may be B-Home decisions that we have.
01:05:00
It could be some of those neighborhoods, maybe we solve them by breaking them down by the best buy or tying them back into the long-term net worth buy.
01:05:11
in power, women in power, the female there in front of us, and the ways that we serve that neighborhood, we can't see them from this constriction that it provides.
01:05:25
The, I guess I just closed, we did have really good responses for
01:05:44
and graphic stuff, I don't know if we've done that, if we need to do that, especially with all of these objects in here, it would be important to get rid of these and stop them afterwards.
01:05:56
Be back to dead.
01:05:59
I-Groom is just a challenge.
01:06:04
I mean, you change one thing here, you effect something on the other side.
01:06:08
And I think we really do need to come back to like,
01:06:13
We start by focusing on intersections themselves and starting to use the forest and trees.
01:06:18
We start to think about transit, I mean, or excuse me, we start to think about molten metal, especially light facilities.
01:06:38
again, not the practice.
01:06:39
So I think we've kind of leaned on our consultants and sort of like think they've been waddling.
01:06:47
Hopefully our track moving forward here again, we've got a very good meeting on Friday this week about public solutions.
01:06:57
And that will start to define some of what the scope of the second phase is when we really start to move from this first
01:07:13
With Ivy Road, in case I don't mind you, the one you want, and this one, that you've also created, kind of what we were supposed to suggest, to do this corridor focus group, which is a representative of a lot of people who work with business owners and HOA's that are directly in the study zone.
01:07:37
We have a meeting with them on October 23rd,
01:07:49
and hopefully that will also help inform if we've missed something, if we've removed something, or if we're emphasizing the right kind of thing.
01:07:56
That will help us hopefully get to a resolution of what it is we're trying to study in the second phase.
01:08:07
Because of the complexity of the ID code,
01:08:17
There are other communities around the state who are trying to take it out of the back of the Cold War and start the Cold War and they go home and they manage to get all the way through to a new project.
01:08:33
I'm not saying this is going to happen on an island, but I would just caution you with the intricacies of whether or not this is going to happen in this situation or not.
01:08:41
Because of the competing issues in the Cold War and the Cold War discussions,
01:08:48
in my study period, you may or may not get to any surprise with the fly position.
01:08:56
So, we'll see.
01:08:57
Hopefully we'll be able to play high company class boxes.
01:09:08
Yeah, I mean, you're talking about the White Gables, is that what you're referring to, the community?
01:09:14
So there's the identity of the people in the 50s.
01:09:20
True.
01:09:21
Yes, there are things happening in the West Side of people, but that's on the other side.
01:09:26
But that's beyond it.
01:09:27
Yeah, but there's plenty of
01:09:39
And it's interesting, I think, I'll be honest with you, I think one of the things I'm trending towards for the whole movement is not to be looting up that wide of an area.
01:09:49
And, of course, as you guys are getting ready to move the greenhouse study, I think we could make something from the Bel Air market to the eastern side of the railroad, the eastern side, kind of feel a good solution right there.
01:10:03
I think that
01:10:09
as well as possibilities.
01:10:11
I know the PDA is awesome.
01:10:13
So you're thinking about, like, connections and some of the unique connections you pull out of the PDA.
01:10:22
But I think it's interesting, our road solutions may be
01:10:38
thought through the area of the study area, but our license may get narrower in focus and maybe some that while we try and hide this, you know, the landings component, the drains component, the foundation component, to decide what is the best way to tackle the Albemarle path through those two points, some elements that may or may not be part
01:11:09
So that we'll find that I think maybe some of this readout has been that congestion and safety issues that are in the intersection itself.
01:11:17
It was small, because you can't see the whole thing like that.
01:11:20
We've talked a lot about it since we started.
01:11:25
So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
01:11:29
I think that's kind of just an update on our thinking right now.
01:11:37
We'll have a formal presentation again.
SPEAKER_05
01:12:03
Thank you, thank you Michael.
01:12:05
I don't have any new information.
01:12:07
The CTV did not meet, well I don't know, did they have a meeting in August?
01:12:12
They did not at least discuss SmartScale in August.
01:12:15
The next meeting is actually tomorrow.
01:12:17
So one of the things that they are talking about tomorrow is
01:12:21
they're going to talk about sort of evaluating the success of previous smart scale projects so that's one of the things that they're looking for is basically we assign these projects benefit scores, how well are they actually performing based on those benefit scores that we
01:12:42
previously reviewed, assuming they're sticking to their schedule.
01:12:46
And then they're also going to talk about some updates to the economic development methodology, and there could be some other updates as well that are considered.
01:12:54
One of the things that the CTB members that were present at the meeting in July discussed was asking for a breakdown of what the changes and the project selections would be for each of the
01:13:10
for each of the VDOT construction districts.
01:13:12
So that could also be something that is presented at the meeting tomorrow.
01:13:16
If you are available and want to be following that, I believe the meeting starts at 830 and it streams live.
01:13:23
I won't be able to follow it live.
01:13:24
I'll have to go back and watch the recording.
01:13:27
But just trying to make you all aware that that conversation is still ongoing.
01:13:32
Sounds like they are going to be presenting their all in recommendations in October.
01:13:36
And then there's going to be a town hall that is scheduled for November with
01:13:40
the expectation that they will be making any changes to adopting new policies around SmartScale in December.
01:13:48
They do have a portal that's set up to receive any comments, so those are things your organization wants to participate in.
01:13:55
They're certainly working to facilitate that process.
01:14:00
But otherwise, I know that this is something that is receiving a lot of attention right now.
01:14:05
I mostly just wanted to keep you all updated as to the extent that I am and also just to leave room for any additional discussion, especially if there were any other thoughts that you had since our previous meeting.
SPEAKER_08
01:14:16
Where will we end up getting a letter to
SPEAKER_05
01:14:28
Yeah, our policy board has not seemed inclined to want to develop a letter.
01:14:34
So I will mention that we discussed it at the policy board meeting last month.
01:14:39
And Captain Darrell Byers, who was our CTV representative, did come to that meeting.
01:14:45
So he did hear some of that discussion.
01:14:47
But as of right now, we're not planning to submit a letter.
SPEAKER_08
01:14:51
They don't want to.
SPEAKER_05
01:14:55
They have not indicated that they would like us to develop any formal comments on behalf of our region.
SPEAKER_09
01:15:04
But you talked to them about the idea of it and they were like, they just don't care.
SPEAKER_05
01:15:15
I think that I don't want to speak for them.
01:15:17
I think you can watch the meetings or.
01:15:26
I mean, I think I think there may be some support for some of the changes as well.
01:15:32
So um, yeah, I don't I don't want to speak for them, though.
SPEAKER_08
01:15:39
Is there a possibility of this committee sending a separate report?
01:15:46
To the Policy Board?
01:15:47
To the Policy Board or to either one?
SPEAKER_08
01:15:53
I would think that something from this would go to the policy board, like requesting that the policy board send out a letter on behalf of the region versus submitting from the tech to the public.
01:16:03
Is that a motion?
01:16:07
That might be something that we need to entertain.
01:16:10
Do we want to make a motion for that now, or is that something we should go on the agenda for next time?
01:16:14
Since the reason we don't do it now, we're running out of time.
01:16:16
They're deciding if it's over.
01:16:28
I guess what I'm trying to say is, policy boards meeting what next week?
01:16:37
November, December, late in October.
SPEAKER_05
01:16:43
They'll meet in October, correct.
SPEAKER_08
01:16:44
We kind of need them to do it next week.
SPEAKER_05
01:16:53
We can buy it?
SPEAKER_09
01:16:54
We kind of need them to get on it, right?
SPEAKER_05
01:17:00
We will be able to add this to the agenda to the policy board meeting next week.
01:17:03
I think it would be okay for October.
SPEAKER_09
01:17:07
Do you want staff to draft a letter?
SPEAKER_10
01:17:25
And you guys want to share some of your thoughts of what would go into a letter that is brought to the Policy Board?
SPEAKER_08
01:17:33
Honestly, I think that's probably a good topic for discussion for the next meeting so that we can flesh out what we need to ask from them.
01:17:41
Okay.
01:17:42
Probably be good for us to ask them exactly what we want to say.
01:17:44
Okay.
SPEAKER_05
01:18:00
Okay.
01:18:07
We'll add that to the agenda in October.
01:18:35
The only thing that I'll mention is that this afternoon we are going to, we invited some additional staff, but kind of during the normal time that we would use our Rural Transportation Advisory Committee meeting, we are meeting with the VDOT Retained Consultants, Kim Lee Horne, to do a first review of the
01:18:55
crash data analysis that's being supported through VDOT.
01:18:59
So this isn't formally part of the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, but it is work that VDOT is supporting that will be incorporated into the Safe Streets and Roads for All.
01:19:12
So I think that's it for updates.
01:19:15
Any other updates on that?
01:19:16
I think that's it.
SPEAKER_09
01:19:20
Uh, the city, uh, we are in the home stretch of Arizona to work in three gray.
01:19:25
Um, at least as far as the planning commission is concerned.
01:19:28
We had a five-hour public hearing on Thursday.
01:19:30
We have another work session today.
01:19:32
Uh, potentially one more work session, uh, I think next week.
01:19:35
Um, but we should have a reformation of council in two weeks.
01:19:38
Um, and then they will, uh, run with it as well and see where that goes.
01:19:43
Um, do you think it's done?
SPEAKER_08
01:19:45
We are running lots and lots of heat.
01:19:54
We also have a bike parking inventory going on right now and we are putting out our bike counter
01:20:25
Walking and biking are also going out and looking at all bike parking cross towns and you can hear out there are a little bit more right now when you go down the hill.
01:20:33
So we're looking to put more, but besides that we're not entirely sure.
SPEAKER_08
01:20:37
Also depends a little bit on property owners, our property owners are UVA where they have their bike parking, so we're working through that with them as well.
01:20:46
And then on the transit side we're continuing to work on the TSP, we're getting through chapter three, we're stuck with chapter three,
01:20:57
Right now we're looking at changes to the first five years to basically incorporate the system optimization plan.
01:21:02
That's our current plan for tax expansion.
01:21:05
It's adopted a couple of years ago but not implemented.
01:21:35
We're currently working on an alternative fuel study as well.
01:21:37
We'll figure out what the next fuel is going to be.
01:21:41
We're at a point right now where we're talking to other transit agencies that have alternative fuels that we're interested in to sort of get their feedback on what's worked for them, what problems they've been facing.
01:21:51
We're also looking at maybe visiting one of those agencies that has multiple fuel types and see if they have issues with fixing fuel types and having some buses on one and some buses
01:22:06
We have 12 sites around the city that we're hoping to put bus shelters down on and DRPG is helping us do that.
01:22:18
So a lot of stuff going on, but specifically this weekend we also had Building to Build.
01:22:26
Like that coordinator taught me, murder me if I didn't do that.
01:22:30
He's the organizer of that.
01:22:32
It's not a city event, it's a land trails event,
01:22:36
There's going to be a lot of people out on the trails this weekend.
01:22:39
A lot of hikers, runners, bikers.
01:22:42
I will be there with you.
01:22:45
Thanks.
01:22:46
How many state projects did you say that number or something?
01:22:52
160.
SPEAKER_08
01:22:52
Most of those are made in classic post projects.
01:22:55
There are some projects that are applications that we did not last year that are going to actually
SPEAKER_08
01:23:10
I remember there was 12 shelters all in the city, or just a round cat.
01:23:14
Those are all in the city, but the county did come up with their own list of shelter libraries that the RPD could help cat in the mountain world.
01:23:22
Cool, thanks.
SPEAKER_04
01:23:26
Yeah, we are in the process of trying to get a bunch of money right now.
01:23:30
We are submitting a Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant.
01:23:33
It's a resubmission of the one we submitted last year with a little bit more focus on some city neighborhoods as well.
01:23:40
And that application is being submitted with support from the City of Charlottesville.
01:23:45
We're also working on our revenue sharing applications.
01:23:48
We're submitting three applications this year to get additional funding to complete
01:23:52
three projects that have been started, but have gotten progressively more and more expensive, and we've needed more money.
01:23:59
So that's what we're working on right now, and I'll hand it off to Albert to talk about project prioritization and how we present the stuff that we've developed.
SPEAKER_06
01:24:07
So yeah, we've developed, it will be there Sunday as part of a little discussion that's seriously happening, so that'll be fun.
01:24:14
And then prioritization, we are actually in a home stretch now, and since for a long time I've worked on it, but like,
01:24:20
like everything's ranked and now tomorrow I'm going to sit there and spend eight hours just going through GIS and making the maps and getting it done.
SPEAKER_08
01:24:29
So I think we're going to the board in October 1st to get the board's feedback for work session and kind of be like, okay, let's see, we'll move from there.
SPEAKER_06
01:24:40
We just formally requested with the board, adopt a resolution to formal request to DDoS looking through truck restriction on Clank Road from North Jarden going north
SPEAKER_08
01:24:51
to 250.
01:24:54
And then, yeah, that's the main things right now.
01:24:58
It's turning a lot.
01:25:01
Well, it's in the end, or from a war standpoint, a lot of it is working with a cop lab, so we have another work session next week.
01:25:12
It's under it.
01:25:13
Yeah, yeah.
01:25:14
I can tell that.
01:25:15
Yeah, working with some of the toolkits and stuff.
01:25:18
Oh, that's a cover.
01:25:21
The Route 20 plan, are you guys still moving forward with that one?
SPEAKER_04
01:25:28
We just received the final deliverable from our consultants.
01:25:32
What we ended up asking them to do was to create some sort of memo describing the alternatives and what the recommendation was from these experts.
01:25:43
So they made a, we are going to submit that
01:25:46
final memo to the board at a future date.
01:25:50
Probably not for discussion.
01:25:52
It's probably just going to go on the like for information only consent agenda.
01:25:59
We are not planning on picking up that like seeking any funding right now for that particular project, but we have all this great work done and it's going to hang out until that project is a higher priority.
SPEAKER_09
01:26:16
DRPT?
SPEAKER_05
01:26:18
I don't see anyone on the call from DRPT.
SPEAKER_08
01:26:20
Okay, Vida, anything to add?
01:26:23
I will add that we, the smart scale courses are going to start in earnest next year for the application at the state level.
01:26:32
But, you know, I've talked to you all before about four steps to account for approval, and the planning at the beginning and the main thing at the end, the third step of engineering and construction is always important.
01:26:44
It's something we
01:26:45
always trying to work through, thinking the right projects for the application, put up a good concept plan with good estimates, best project selection component.
01:26:55
We'll really start pushing on over the next little months, starting out.
01:26:59
We'll be reaching out to the localities to talk about which projects we may want to start working on on this and how can we help if they choose to help develop some of these projects.
01:27:16
Basically, I see the smart scale projects coming in three major streams.
01:27:21
First stream is the stars and pipeline studies that I was talking about earlier, which will generate some projects.
01:27:28
The second one is PSI, potential safety improvement areas, intersections, segments of roads, to save the schools well in the smart scale.
01:27:40
And the third category is kind of an other.
01:27:42
It's kind of like what projects
01:27:53
who are residency engineers to our localities to talk about these types of projects.
01:27:58
So if there is something that you all are thinking about for a smart scale project, especially if it falls in that kind of other category, like head projects or something like that, we'd be very interested in finding out what you all are thinking about.
01:28:17
Because again, we would like to try either
01:28:24
as far as the detailed nature of the plans and the estimates that will fund these funding applications and or how BI can help with all those concept plans and estimates and partnerships in locality.
01:28:40
So that's the process from the working boards and you'll be hearing from us in a couple of weeks.
01:28:50
Alright, next up is right chair.
SPEAKER_03
01:28:58
Hey everyone, just a really quick update.
01:29:00
We are in the throes of celebrating lots of transit this month.
01:29:06
It is the birthday of the Acton Express, their two-year anniversary, and so they have some events planned.
01:29:13
I know they were stationed outside at some stops at UVA handing out birthday cookies.
01:29:20
and we'll be doing another fare-free day and then an event I believe at one of the stops on their side of the mountain, I believe the Stanton Mall next week.
01:29:32
This is also Discover Transit Month for DRPT, so we have been doing various transit promotions with that and then gearing up to start promoting carpools and vanpools again.
01:29:45
And that's all for Rideshare.
SPEAKER_08
01:29:52
Okay, David, go ahead.
SPEAKER_10
01:29:54
Thank you, Sarah.
01:29:58
Oh, we can't hear you, David.
SPEAKER_08
01:30:09
David, you're on mute.
SPEAKER_05
01:30:10
It wasn't a second ago.
01:30:14
Maybe we can come back to him.
01:30:16
Yeah, we'll come back to him.
SPEAKER_08
01:30:18
All right, do we come back now?
SPEAKER_10
01:30:23
Yeah, so we are working on redesigning some of our connect routes based on the GDP recommendations and We just had our first kickoff meeting for the world needs assessment study that we're conducting with North Dakota State University, so Yeah, I think our next meeting will be in December Part of it's like the technical studies that are kind of just gathering information But it's we had a pretty good turnout for the weekend, even on the spiritual, but yeah
01:31:16
on the project side
SPEAKER_08
01:31:46
Yes, the I-44 continues to be a part of construction projects that are in the way of the reactive projects that are in the way of construction.
01:31:59
It contains an impact on the industry in the I-14 road.
01:32:03
It's pretty high, but it's a little less so lately.
01:32:06
And the I-14 road, in particular, in the green applications scene, is really starting to coalesce
SPEAKER_08
01:32:19
The other one I want to mention which is not under construction yet but complaining and
01:32:49
Biotechnology
01:33:18
new building because we're building that off of system parking so we're replacing the parking garage but also additional command for that building and future building so we're going to build it now for development and future and you know the really impact for our community that is
SPEAKER_05
01:34:09
David, do you want to try again?
SPEAKER_00
01:34:11
Yeah, can you hear me now?
01:34:12
All right, good.
01:34:14
We have these new docking stations and I wonder if it's just not picking me up.
01:34:18
So thank you everybody.
01:34:21
I'm David Cook, the statewide bicycle and pedestrian planner here at VDOT's central office.
01:34:26
We have a couple of new items and initiatives that are underway.
01:34:30
First off, we do have a state trails plan that is underway and the survey for that just launched yesterday.
01:34:38
So we'll be sending out the survey link to all of our MPO partners, localities, PDCs.
01:34:45
I'm going to go ahead and drop the survey in the comments for you guys, but basically that'll help us identify gaps, barriers, opportunities in the statewide trail network, and kind of get preferences on how we should develop trails for what type of user and where they should be.
01:35:05
so be sure to kind of spread the word on that.
01:35:09
Secondly, we do have a fresh new contract for runway reconfigurations that just started about a week ago with Michael Baker International, our on-cog consultant providing technical services, basically any all data collection, existing conditions analysis, and no build operational analysis
01:35:31
virtual and in-person meetings and kind of the final alternative conceptual design and cost estimates.
01:35:38
So if you have any ideas or priorities for roadway reconfigurations or road diets, go ahead and please let our office know.
01:35:47
We can assist you in any kind of technical preparation work and documentation on roadway reconfigurations.
01:35:55
Otherwise, we are currently working on our vulnerable roadway user assessment that is a federally mandated safety analysis of pedestrian and bicycle hotspots or crash locations.
01:36:07
What types of facilities are the crashes occurring on?
01:36:11
Basically looking at roadway design and area types and different levels of areas.
01:36:19
We'll go ahead and keep you guys updated.
01:36:21
VDOT does have a page out on that on our website.
01:36:25
We are actually going to be launching our PSAP, except this summer around it's going to be the PDSAP, the Pedestrian Bicycle Safety Action Plan.
01:36:34
This will be our fourth iteration of that mapping tool and document.
01:36:39
So that should be launching in concurrence with the vulnerable roadway user assessment in November when we have that document finalized.
01:36:46
So we do have a new kind of weighting methodology for this update with a little bit more
01:36:54
a little bit more weighting on the roadway characteristic, followed by place-based characteristics.
01:37:03
So their weighting has changed a little bit.
01:37:04
Some of the locations and corridors have changed, but be looking for that in November, that will kind of directly feed to V-Trans and how we identify bicycle safety improvements in V-Trans.
01:37:17
But that is really it for updates from central office.
01:37:22
Thank you.
SPEAKER_09
01:37:26
Alright, so with that we'll go to our closing matter from the public.
01:37:29
We have a couple of members of the public here and on the Zoom.
01:37:32
Does anyone wish to give any comments?
01:37:38
Looks like a no from here.
01:37:40
We've got a couple on the Zoom.
01:37:42
Feel free to unmute if you'd like to give a comment.
01:37:49
Alright, looks like a no.
01:37:51
Anyone else on the other matter?