MPO Technical Committee Meeting   9/19/2023

Alberic?

All right.

Acceptance of the agenda, approval of the August 15th minutes.

Any corrections?

Second?

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right, minutes passed unanimously.

All right.

Thanks for having us here.

We're going to just do an overview here of works of the engagement process so far on the long-range transportation plan update.

It's been busy here this year on the engagement side for the long-range plan.

I do have an agenda here of going through what the PDC's engagement goals have been throughout this process.

Certainly there are variables and conditions to consider with any type of engagement process that you're doing, so we'll go over that.

I have an overview of the efforts done so far, just to make sure that we have documented that as well as

We have the pending engagement report that's coming out a little bit later this month, so you should have that completed by the end of September and have that available to you all.

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.

So the goal statements that are really the foundation for the performance measures, undefining needs as well as prioritizing projects,

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 through that, and then affirming and reviewing the plan document itself when we get further along the process.

In terms of

Real engagement goals.

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.

We want it to also be meaningful so that when we ask the community to take time to provide feedback and provide engagement,

There's a very clear communication back to them that their feedback and their time is being used in the process.

We don't want to ask any questions if there's not some real intention on using that feedback.

So it's very important that it's a meaningful process.

And understanding transportation planning is not the most intuitive thing out there.

We were talking recently about

The MPO is updating their LRTP, they'll put projects in the TIP, so the CTP can be in the SYIP.

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.

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.

Some of these

You might call them challenges or things that we wanted to address throughout the public engagement process as well.

First off is long range planning is inherently difficult.

For any of you folks who are in local government, you might see this quite a bit when you have your comprehensive plan update.

Depending on where you are, you might not get a lot of involvement on that.

You might have some empty rooms when you plan those public meetings.

But when that first rezoning comes up, then all of a sudden,

It becomes a lot more tangible to folks and they'll show up and have a lot of say on that.

Same thing on the transportation front as well.

This is long range planning here.

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

Numerous engagement processes in the region between the county's comprehensive plan, the city's comprehensive plan, which is not long ago, the transit vision plan.

There's been plenty of other transportation efforts out there with engagement.

And that really kind of eats up the real estate in terms of the engagement capital out there.

So we wanted to think about ways to get around that.

And then again, transportation is just, it's a technical thing.

It's sometimes a little counterintuitive.

So that was another challenge that we wanted to acknowledge and account for in the process.

So in terms of actual engagement efforts, I think PDC MTO staff has really gone really above and beyond on trying to reach out to the community.

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.

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.

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.

Really, the purpose of that was to get their feedback on the goal statement, so what are the overall regional

goals and fine-tuning the objectives which would then really be essential to developing the performance measures needed to score needs and projects.

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.

Next up we had the virtual public meeting that was on June 20th, so a little bit later on the calendar.

After we really processed the stakeholder meetings, staff presented this, had some good attendance.

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.

So that was on June 21st, had a series of maps lined up in the room here.

The real focus was to provide feedback on those goals, objectives, identifying transportation needs.

There's a big map we could mark those needs on here and just trying to identify what are the main community concerns.

That's a good step early in an engagement process.

With the open house, there was information there of the upcoming survey that was coming out that got launched in July.

Again, there's been a lot of surveys out there.

People only take but so many surveys.

And a lot of the folks who are really tuned in on transportation had gotten hit by a few earlier.

But I think we got good numbers here.

It was over 300 responses.

There was a map where you could mark on the map specific locations and concerns and issues.

They got over 1,100 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.

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.

I will say also on distribution, staff reached out to the stakeholder groups, reached out

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.

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.

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.

So really try to put a big effort into that.

In terms of public intercepts, staff also went out to, there was the National Night Out,

A presence in both of those.

Staff was at the transit center and had a table lined up and wanted to reach out to folks there at the transit center.

There are also presentations at the Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority.

They have regular meetings with residents there and staff was there at those meetings to get feedback, concerns.

other issues and help report that as well.

But I would say also the survey, I think we had good response looking at the results, and Alan will go over this too, just wanted to make sure that it was representative.

So we had good response, but we just wanted to get a little bit more diversity here in our responses.

So I wanted to go take a few extra steps here of reaching out to the community directly.

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.

Sandy has been meeting with the community advisory committees in Albemarle County, has been working through those meetings, having a presence there and going through the plan.

I don't know if we'll reach back out to the CACs in this way through the other round.

It was pretty time-extensive, but we will try to coordinate to make sure that they have the opportunity to follow up.

We'll work with Albemarle County staff.

No, it was pretty good.

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.

And it wasn't just the CAC members.

I mentioned that there's been a lot of other planning processes going on.

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.

It's a little bit harder here.

What we're doing with staff is going through these other processes.

Since they do exist, they are valid, there has been a lot of dialogue with the community already on these other efforts.

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.

That's a good way to, 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.

Staff launched an online project website back last year.

So that's been up and running.

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.

And as I mentioned, we did have social media presence and just trying to hit

I officially had to change the Twitter logo out with X. I guess that's what we're following it now.

Is it had to?

I don't know what the rules are now.

Real quick on the engagement report and Alan's going to get into some preliminary findings here in a second 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.

There were some kind of interesting results where

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.

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.

So we'll talk about that.

We do want the engagement report, which you'll see soon.

We're actually almost done with it.

That can serve as the engagement chapter in the plan.

So it's nice to start to create material for the plan document itself.

And certainly it's going to be filling up the appendix part of the engagement too.

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?

And that goes back to having a meaningful process where whatever we're collecting, we want to maintain trust with the community.

So if we ask a question,

We have an intention to actually use the answer here and show how that actually influences the process.

In terms of function, the report could be a standalone document which will live online.

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.

Again, it can also be elements of the final document as well.

So it's always nice to start to create their content and plan as you go along.

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

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.

Also influence project selection directly, so we're going to map all comments, put the projects on there.

If there's a project that's kind of on the fence between the vision list and the constraint list, you know, if we get a lot of public support for it, then that kind of moves it around kind of those thresholds on those points.

If we have a lot of comments on a project that could potentially influence the design of that project or approach, I think also just looking into the future for future long-range plan updates,

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.

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.

So that was, I want to hand it over to Alan.

Hopefully Alan can hear us okay.

Cool.

Great.

All right.

So as Will mentioned, we're working on an engagement report that I'm putting together.

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.

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.

So we use the following categories.

These just kind of came up naturally as I was going through the comments.

So safety, efficiency, connections, multimodal improvements or needs, land use concerns, economy, and everything else.

So the report's going to tie these categories into the plan's goals.

So for example, a lot of the comments that were categorized as other were about the environment.

So we'll probably make a new category there for those.

Connections, a lot of times that was related to equity, accessibility.

So we'll make sure that these comments kind of tie into the goals and, you know, how it all relates.

So we'll have more detailed analysis of these comments in the engagement report.

And then I'm going to show some graphs here in the next couple of slides, but note that a lot of these comments fell into more than one category.

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.

So, Will, if you want to advance to the next slide.

So first, this is how the in-person engagement efforts broke down.

So

Everything that's been done in person for the Moving Toward 2050 plan.

So multimodal concerns dominated the themes of these comments.

So people really were concerned about bike access, pedestrian access, public transit.

That all falls into the multimodal category.

Safety was second, but you know,

Quite a bit lower than the multimodal concern.

And that's kind of a theme we've seen in these comments.

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.

We need a protected bike lane.

So I kind of tried to split those out.

If it was explicitly about safety, I mentioned it there.

And then you've got efficiency, so that's mostly related to traffic congestion, the efficiency of bus schedules, that kind of thing.

Connections, that's anything from the need for sidewalks to more bus routes.

A handful of comments that were explicitly about land use, zoning concerns, that kind of thing.

Anything that was related to parking specifically when under land use.

And then 55 comments in the other categories.

So that kind of suggests we need to kind of break those out into other categories.

But environmental concerns really dominated the other category.

And you want to move to the next slide.

So compare that to the Albemarle County comp plan update.

Land use was by far the most dominant category here.

And

A lot of these comments were talking about a need or a desire to preserve rural space, concerns about growth, that kind of thing.

But there were also a lot of comments about public transit.

So a lot of the multimodal comments you see here were about the need for more bus routes coming out to the county.

that kind of thing.

Efficiency, most of that was about traffic congestion and the concerns about increased congestion if there's future growth in the county.

The other categories didn't really show up too much.

The SEVO plans together survey, multimodal concerns dominated that one again.

A lot of discussion about bike lanes, sidewalks, bus routes, that kind of thing.

By far the most common comment we heard there.

Everything else kind of

All the other comments were fairly even down there at the bottom.

But yeah, that one was absolutely dominated by bike lanes, bus routes, that kind of thing.

And the Regional Transit Vision, again, pretty similar to the Seville Plans Together survey.

You know, this was about the whole region though.

So again, multimodal concerns were at the top.

Other

That kind of suggests that we need to break those comments out again into more specific categories.

But again, those are mostly about the environment, that kind of thing.

So yeah, we saw a little bit of variation in the different public engagement methods here.

The Albemarle one was the one that stuck out the most to me about land use and zoning concerns.

But in general, there's a lot of discussion about

the need for more transit routes and bike lanes, sidewalks, pedestrian facilities, that kind of thing in all of the surveys.

So the MetroQuest survey.

So we're gonna go over a little overview of what we saw there.

We only had a handful of open-ended comments.

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.

So we have 334 survey participants

We had about just a handful of open-ended comments, but we'll address those in the engagement report.

So the next slides are going to go over kind of the breakdown of the responses we heard.

I'm also going to go over a couple of maps because we got 1100 comments on the mapping portion of this.

So the first question in this survey is about ranking priorities.

What was most important to people in terms of transportation needs?

This one we did see a high number of comments related to safety.

So that was the highest ranking topic.

Environmental concerns were second.

Multibodal accessibility was third.

Land use and efficiency and economic development were both tied for last place.

So you see a little difference here between this and the other engagement efforts.

So that was a little interesting to me.

Move to the next slide.

The next three questions were about trade-offs.

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.

The first question was about balancing the priority between roadway improvement and multimodal system improvements.

The graph over here to the right, if people wanted to see more roadway improvements, they were voting to the left.

So far left, left neutral, depending on how strongly they felt about that.

And if you wanted to see more multiple modes of transportation, you'd be voting more to the right.

So the far right was definitely the most common response here.

So prioritizing multiple modes of transportation.

That's a pretty clear result to me.

Access trade-offs.

This one was pretty evenly distributed.

A lot of people were pretty neutral about this, but there was a lot of neutral.

And then the next was kind of a tendency to want access to jobs.

But so this question was about, you know, should transportation projects be more about getting people to work or getting them anywhere else?

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 are you more concerned about active public transportation in terms of which do you think would be better for meeting climate goals?

And

Active and public transportation definitely seemed to win out here, but there was still some sentiment for congestion reduction.

And these were kind of tied hand, they're related issues, but yeah, that was how that one broke down.

The next few we're gonna go over, these are just some very high level maps.

They might be a little hard to read.

The engagement report is gonna go into more detail with these.

I'm gonna kind of zoom into some of these

You know, areas where we're seeing a lot of comments.

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.

So we're seeing up 29 up to the airport.

A lot of comments there all throughout Charlottesville.

Obviously, we're seeing a lot there.

Crozet, we have a lot of comments and then we have a few more spread throughout the region.

So yeah, in the engagement report, it will go into a little bit more

micro detail on these areas and highlight hotspots.

Probably add some heat maps as well.

Bike and ped.

Here we're seeing distributed all over the region, a lot in Crozet on Park, looking for bike and ped improvements.

West Main Street in Charlottesville is a hotspot there.

And then throughout Charlottesville and throughout the region,

plenty of other locations where people were looking for bike and pet improvements.

Up 29, you see that as well, a little hotspot there.

So again, we'll go into a little more detail in the engagement report, but that's the overview of those improvements.

Roadway improvements, a lot of these were about intersections.

I think that was the dominant theme when people categorized the comment as a roadway improvement.

A lot of concern about intersection improvements and anything that kind of didn't

directly fall under like a bike pad improvement or a transit improvement.

Concerns about the quality of the road, number of lanes, that kind of thing, but intersections and intersection safety is probably the dominant theme here.

Next slide.

And finally, these were all comments related to safety.

So again, you know, this map, I don't know how much you can get from this map.

I think it's going to be more useful in the report when we kind of zoom in on the hotspots here.

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.

So plenty to look at in the engagement report with this one.

For the survey, we also had kind of some demographic questions.

The majority of people who took the survey drive alone as their primary form of transportation.

And then biking came second, walking, carpool around 9, 7%, 4% of people took the bus or other forms of transit, and then everything else kind of zero to 1%.

So mostly car drivers, but a good chunk of bikers and people who use other forms of transit.

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%.

So the breakdown there was mostly white and not a ton of representation from other races in the survey.

For age, pretty even breakdown, 35 to 44 was the dominant category.

followed by 65 and older and then pretty even breakdown for the rest.

No one under 18 for the survey.

And household income, again, pretty even split.

This goes clockwise in terms of the legends.

It might be a little hard to make out those colors, but yeah, pretty even split in terms of income.

Not a ton of low-income respondents.

The majority of respondents were above the $50,000 household income mark.

That's how the online survey broke down.

And then gender identity.

Skewed male, 43% female,

8% prefer not to answer and then zero to 1% transgender or nonconforming or non-binary.

So that was the breakdown of the initial results of what we saw from all these engagement efforts.

You know, I think pretty good spread on the income side, race 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.

In terms of, next up, last slide here, I'm gonna have the full engagement plan wrapped up by the end of this month.

Also looking at the finalized weighting for the performance measures, and that's, I know, coming up, I think, on your agenda here in October.

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.

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.

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.

So then beginning to pare down that candidate project list because there's a ton of transportation projects in the region.

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.

And we did have a few questions, but just to kind of get discussion going, certainly want to see kind of what your takeaways were, if you saw anything interesting or counter to what you were thinking there.

We did have the question too of, we can look at these things like the survey, the public intercepts of these different channels.

and look at them independently or we can put them basically average them all together into one consideration.

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.

If we keep them a little separate, 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.

So you mentioned diversity and so what's done to try to achieve more diversity?

Because when I look at research from a race standpoint there wasn't much.

Do you want me to respond to that one or do you want to?

One of the things that we did was try to work with organizations that specifically have relationships with some of those communities.

So that was one of the reasons we went to the transit centers and also we worked with CRHA.

They have their regular planning meetings with

different communities throughout the city of Charlottesville.

So we did conduct some outreach with them.

And then we also had some of those representatives like PHA, for example, the Piedmont Housing

group, we had those on our stakeholder committee.

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.

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

Yeah, I appreciate those efforts to try to get more involvement, but it's really not represented at all.

So both in the race, and then when I, 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.

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

CRHA meetings, the stakeholder groups.

It's really difficult to collect this data if you're talking to 100 or more folks at events to also collect their income.

They're just not going to really provide that in that format.

So part of this year was just to show what the survey kind of

composition was, and then how that triggered us to do these other next steps.

Unfortunately, we just don't have much of a way to document, raise our income, and we certainly weren't gonna try to eyeball that.

I mean, that's not something we can do.

So yeah, it's unfortunate we can't get all that data, but this was probably about half, I think it was over 600 people engaged.

We had a little over 300 on the survey.

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

You know, a person that is served by those organizations or services.

And I guess you might be reaching out and you are reaching out, but it's just not such a challenge.

You might want to think about how you captivate.

There are ways to do it.

It was really a variety of ways 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 we had like an opportunity for people we would give them

Pretend transportation money and ask them how they would divvy it up between the goals and objectives.

And then it was just like open feedback, like tell us what you think about the transportation system.

So it was very, very open and it was based on them either filling out a comment card or telling it to us directly.

Now for the places where we, like the CAC meetings example, were just meetings that we attended.

And this was really us just having a discussion and me saying, you know,

This is an overview of the Long Range Transportation Plan.

What are your top transportation priorities?

That was basically the prompt.

The second prompt that I had at the very end was just this stream of consciousness idea.

What is the first thing that you think of when we say, in order to improve the transportation system we need to focus on?

The in-person, they were a little bit more focused on the multi-modal side and the survey was a little more focused on the safety side.

And with the in-person discussions, we did try to mimic the survey as much as we could.

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.

and then had the money game kind of exercise that we had with them.

So we tried to really, we couldn't, the trade-off side was one part of the survey we couldn't hit so well.

But I think we had pretty good kind of success with the in-person at the public events.

We averaged like maybe 10 people an hour, which was pretty good.

Not yet.

Yep.

So we were taking

Noting anything that has a specific location and I'll add a data point for that.

Kennedy, or a combination of all you have to do is set a pipeline for us.

Again, what we heard last, we've been in and out, but there have been changes that have been on-scale scoring, and how we're going to score that day is we've developed our planning project for the Olympics, and have it sell to the public.

So this is a challenge.

Localities will still be able to apply for the smaller bike projects as well.

Would you like for the next steps?

How do you see taking the points that we're going to get from

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.

How does that work into a more integrated system?

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 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 we can

We're coding and we can break that data out into different areas.

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.

So that can kind of feed into whatever efforts in the future might go towards that.

I think for the purposes of the longer transportation plan,

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.

So we can verify and look at what the data tells us.

The secondary data is the public engagement.

Does that align well with the secondary data of what that tells us that these are?

And if they perfectly overlap, that's great.

And that validates what the data is telling us

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?

Because data is great, but it doesn't always capture everything.

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 V-Trans set of data.

I think the other part of it too is, you know, if there is a 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 its UPWP and say, these are some locations that are really high concern locations.

Maybe there's data here supporting that.

kind of to set up of we need to develop, we need to study these areas.

There might be some strong preferences put in place where here's a corridor.

It's a big concern.

We want multimodal approaches here on this corridor.

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.

Really the way this long-range transportation plan has always been set up is

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.

And if there's any issues or hotspots where there's not a project already identified, then that kind of

comes up for the next five-year update of here's an issue, we need to develop something for this area.

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.

So I think it's going to be helpful in that regard.

We're going to hand everything over to the MPOs.

Yeah, that's what Alan's working on right now.

So that's being processed, because we don't know these kind of things.

Yeah.

And part of the limitations of the slides we're showing now is just kind of what we have so far.

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.

I usually follow that up.

We may end up finding and work to prioritize the stuff.

You may have a community that

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.

So the projects themselves should have been developed with, you know, some sort of larger context in mind.

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.

We had a range, but certainly higher income, a little less diversity on that front.

The public intercepts kind of kicked in in order to try to get more kind of equity, kind of hit different income ranges.

So those are gonna be kind of more on that end.

We talked about just combining those data sets into one, and we're just analyzing basically the sum of those data sets.

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 datasets but any I guess any thoughts on that of kind of if you put them together then one can kind of kind of

Change the averages here, whereas if you keep them separate, you can kind of consider the needs and the feedback from these different groups.

transit, or biking.

I put sidewalks and things like that tended to go more in the connections area.

Yeah, it depends on where the comments were.

And that's something that I should probably look at in a little more detail and kind of break out

in the final report.

And I will do that.

I do want to, I mean, there's some other variables here that can introduce bias.

And one of them is we just went through a transit vision planning process and we did have a lot of involvement on that.

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.

There might be some self-selection bias here too.

We try to do as much as we could to try to eliminate as much bias as possible.

That's impossible to eliminate it completely.

There could be a little undercount on the transit side because there has been so much transit surveying done recently.

So we are looking at the transit vision plan, trying to pull that in here as well and have that be part of the dataset, but just something to be aware of.

You should just have a one regional survey.

But yeah, so I'm going to guess that the survey is going to, that there are some self selection biases here, I guess.

Which is something we just want to document.

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.

Yeah, we had such a bad one, the RTSP survey, it was like 3,500 responses but only half percent of them were really.

Yeah, we can track IP addresses on there.

And then also we look at the timestamps to try to track.

Yeah.

And in terms of how long it's been, it's out there that it's open.

How long would it take an individual?

Oh, an individual.

Yeah, it looks like it was around 10 minutes.

And probably a lot of that was the mapping.

There were 334 respondents that we got over a lot of the app comments.

It's fairly short.

We also made postcards.

You could write comments and hand the postcard in, but there's also a QR code for the for the survey.

So we did ask people to take the survey.

I think we saw a tiny bump.

And Will, Alan and I got some of your comments here, so we're going to make a few adjustments on the report.

If you have any more thoughts of something you'd like to see in terms of the analysis, please let us know.

Because with any data set, you can show it any number of ways.

All right.

Next up, we have data updates.

Alright, go ahead.

Yeah, inclusion in your packet was a set of adjustments by VDOT to include, this is an informational item, basically it's moving money from FY23 to FY24.

Any questions about it?

I don't have a presentation, per se.

We're moving forward with three pipeline projects in the community.

We actually have a meeting scheduled on Friday.

We will report back to you what the plans have been so far on Eric's earlier project.

We're still working on the Ivan Rogge.

Our consultants came back and gave us an internal presentation.

We have to do a little bit more work on that item, more work.

So hopefully we can come back with an invite to that meeting, which we'd like to.

We'll finally write down, I mean obviously, you know, they're assessing crash and congestion down along Bexford and Fort Worth.

Barrick Road Corps was a very tough place to try and do something.

A lot of infrastructure, a lot of built environment right along the road there.

And getting underneath the bypass is a tough nut to crack.

There's not a lot of room for facilities.

There are, of course, some existing sidewalks out there.

And we found some sidewalks and places.

Again, there's a couple of the utility poles that are not being required.

Some of them are not in the best conditions.

using ADA lamps.

There's permissive yellows for electric traffic, and so that creates conflicts with pedestrians who are walking along there.

So that might be a relatively easy, easy fix.

But I think trying to get a charity's path out there is going to be a good way to challenge this.

And how we, you know, figure out solutions to that is pretty interesting.

Some of the solutions may be beyond the standards that we have.

You know, 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.

We did have really good responses for

Now, in graphic stuff, I don't know if we've done that, if we need to do that, especially with all these objects in here, it'll be important to get rid of these all the way backwards, be back to dead.

Eye to room is just a challenge.

I mean, you change one thing here, you affect something on the other side.

And I think we really need to be able to come back to like,

We start by focusing on intersections themselves and starting to use the forest and trees.

We start to think about transit, I mean, or excuse me, we start to think about molten metal, especially light facilities.

Again, not to brag, so I think we've kind of leaned on our consultants, who I think have been waddling.

Hopefully, our track moving forward here, again, we've got a very good meeting on Friday this week about public solutions.

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

With Ivy Road, in case I don't mind you, the one you want, this one, that you also created, kind of what we were supposed to suggest, to do this tour or focus room, which is where some of the people who work with business owners and HOA's that are directly in the study zone, we have a meeting with them on October 23rd,

And hopefully that will also help inform if we've missed something, if we've removed something, or if we're emphasizing the right day to day, but that will help us hopefully get to a resolution of what it is we're trying to study in the second phase.

Because of the complexity of the ID code,

There are other communities around the state who are trying to take it out of the back of the 4-4 and they go up and they manage to get all the way through to the next project.

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.

Because of the competing issues in the 4-4 discussion,

So we'll see.

Hopefully we'll be able to do that.

Yeah, I mean, you're talking about the White Gables, is that the word, the community?

So there's the identity of the people in the 50s.

True.

Yes, there are things happening in the West Side of the world, but that's on the other side.

But that's beyond it.

Yeah, but the stamina that they have in the world, there's plenty of

And it's interesting, I think, I'll be honest with you, I think one of the things I'm trending towards for the multi-modal is not to be looting up that wide of an area.

An important thing is you guys are getting ready to remove the green-on stud.

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.

I think that

I think in some aspects our road solutions may be

We've thought through the areas in the study area that are likely to be made narrower in focus and maybe some that, while we try and hide this, you know, the landings component, the drains component, the adaptation 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

So I think we'll find that I think maybe some of this VDOT has been that congestion and safety issue that in the intersection itself.

It was small, because you can't see the whole thing like that.

We've talked a lot about it since we started.

So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

I think that's kind of just an update on our thinking right now.

Thank you Michael.

I don't have any new information.

The CTV did not meet, well I don't know, did they have a meeting in August?

They did not at least discuss SmartScale in August.

The next meeting is actually tomorrow.

So one of the things that they are talking about tomorrow is

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

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

for each of the VDOT construction districts.

So that could also be something that is presented at the meeting tomorrow.

If you are available and want to be following that, I believe the meeting starts at 8.30 and it streams live.

I won't be able to follow it live.

I'll have to go back and watch the recording.

But just trying to make you all aware that that conversation is still ongoing.

Sounds like they are going to be presenting their all in recommendations in October.

And then there's going to be a town hall that is scheduled for November with

The expectation that they will be making any changes to adopting new policies around SMART SCALE in December.

They do have a portal that's set up to receive any comments, so those are things your organization wants to participate in.

They're certainly working to facilitate that process.

But otherwise, I know that this is something that is receiving a lot of attention right now.

But you talked to them about the idea of it, and they were like, eh.

I think that I don't want to speak for them.

I think you could watch the meetings or have.

I mean, I think there may be some support for some of the changes as well.

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.

Is that a motion?

That might be something that we need to entertain.

We will be able to add this to the agenda to the policy board meeting next week.

I think it would be okay for October.

Do you guys want to share some of your thoughts of what would go into a letter then brought to Policy Board?

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.

Okay.

Probably be good for us to ask them.

We'll add that to the agenda in October.

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

crash data analysis that's being supported through VDOT.

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.

So I think that's it for updates.

Any other updates on that?

In the city, we are in the home stretch of Arizona to work in Three Gray, at least as far as the planning commission is concerned.

We had a five-hour public hearing on Thursday.

We have another work session today, potentially one more work session I think next week, but we should have a reformation of council in two weeks, and then they will run with it as we'll see how that goes.

Do you know if David's done?

We're getting through Chapter 3.

We're stuck with Chapter 3.

Right now we're looking at changes to the first five years to basically incorporate the system optimization plan.

That's our current plan for tax expansion.

It's adopted a couple years ago but not implemented.

We're currently working on an alternative fuel study as well.

We'll figure out what the next fuel is going to be.

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.

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

We have 12 sites around the city that we're hoping to put bus shelters down on and DRPT is helping us do that.

So a lot of stuff going on, but specifically this weekend we also had Building to Build.

Like that coordinator told me, murder me if I didn't do that.

He's the organizer of that.

It's not a city event, it's a land trails event,

There's going to be a lot of people out on the trails this weekend.

A lot of hikers, runners, bikers, some of them.

I will be there with you.

Thanks.

How many state projects did you say?

A hundred and sixty.

Most of those are made in plastic.

Those are all in the city.

The county did come up with their own list of shelter libraries that DRPT could help CAT in the county.

Cool.

Yeah, we are in the process of trying to get a bunch of money right now.

We are submitting a Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant.

It's a resubmission of the one we submitted last year with a little bit more focus on some city neighborhoods as well.

And that application is being submitted with support from the City of Charlottesville.

We're also working on our revenue sharing applications.

We're submitting three applications this year to get additional funding to complete

Three projects that have been started, but have gotten progressively more and more expensive, and we've needed more money.

So yeah, we've developed, and we'll be there Sunday as part of the little discussion that's seriously happening, so that'll be fun.

And then the prioritization, we are actually in a home stretch now, and since for a long time I've worked on it, but like,

Like, everything's ranked, and now tomorrow I'm gonna sit there and spend eight hours just going through GIS and making the maps and getting it done.

So I think we're going to the board in October 1st to get the board's feedback for the work session and kind of be like, okay, let's see, we'll move from there.

We just formally requested with the board, adopt a resolution to formally request the VDOT look at the food truck restriction on Clank Road from North Jarden going north

Yeah, yeah.

I can tell that.

We just received the final deliverable from our consultants.

What we ended up asking them to do was to create like a sort of memo describing the alternatives and what the recommendation was from these experts.

So they made a, we are going to submit that

Final memo to the board at a future date, probably not for discussion.

It's probably just going to go on a like for information only consent agenda.

I will add that we, the Smart Scale course is going to start, it burns for next year for the application at the state level, but, you know, I've talked to you all before about four steps of capital improvement, and the planning at the beginning, and the main thing at the end, the third step of engineering and construction is always important, it's something we

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.

We'll really start pushing on over the next little months starting out.

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.

Basically, I see the SMART SCALE projects kind of coming in three major streams.

The first stream is the STARS and pipeline studies that I was talking about earlier, which will potentially generate some projects.

The second one is PSI, potential safety improvement areas, intersections, segments of roads, the safety of schools as well as SMART SCALE.

And the third category is kind of an other.

It's kind of like what projects

through the residency engineers to our localities to talk about these types of projects.

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.

Hey everyone, just a really quick update.

We are in the throes of celebrating lots of transit this month.

It is the birthday of the Acton Express, their two-year anniversary, and so they have some events planned.

I know they were stationed outside at some stops at UVA handing out birthday cookies.

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.

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.

Thank you, Sara.

It wasn't a second ago.

Maybe we can come back to him.

Yeah.

Do we come back now?

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 that's

On the project side,

Yes, the ID board of work continues to be a part of construction projects that are going to be reactive to projects that are going to be under construction.

It contains an impact in my industry, the ID board, it's pretty high, they're less so limited, and the ID board, in particular, in the green applications team, is really starting to coalesce

The other one I want to mention which is not under construction yet but in planning and

via technology.

New building, because we're building that off of system parking, so we're replacing the parking garage, but also special command for that building and future building, so we're going to build it now for development and future.

Yeah, can you hear me now?

All right, good.

We have these new docking stations, and I wonder if it's just not picking me up.

So thank you, everybody.

I'm David Cook, the statewide bicycle and pedestrian planner here at VDOT's central office.

We have a couple of new items and initiatives that are underway.

First off, we do have a state trails plan that is underway, and the survey for that just launched yesterday.

So we'll be sending out the survey link to all of our MPO partners, localities, PDCs.

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.

So be sure to kind of spread the word on that.

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,

virtual and in-person meetings, and kind of the final alternative conceptual design and cost estimates.

So if you have any ideas or priorities for roadway reconfigurations or road diets, go ahead and please let our office know we can assist you in any kind of technical preparation work and documentation on roadway reconfigurations.

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.

What types of facilities are the crashes occurring on?

Basically, looking at roadway design and area types and different levels of areas.

We'll go ahead and keep you guys updated.

VDOT does have a page out on that on our website.

We are actually going to be launching our PSAP, except this summer round it's going to be the PDSAP, the Pedestrian Bicycle Safety Action Plan.

This will be our fourth iteration of that mapping tool and document.

So that should be launching in concurrence with the vulnerable roadway user assessment in November when we have that document finalized.

So we do have a new kind of weighting methodology for this update with a little bit more

A little bit more weighting on the roadway characteristic followed by place-based characteristics.

So their weighting has changed a little bit.

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.

But that is really it for updates from central office.

All right, so with that, we'll go to our closing matter from the public.

We have a couple of members of the public here and on the Zoom.

Does anyone wish to give any comments?

It's like a no from here.

We've got a couple on the Zoom.

Feel free to unmute if you'd like to give a comment.

All right, looks like a no.