MPO Technical Committee Meeting   5/21/2024

All right, matters from the public.

Any change to the agenda?

No.

I'll take a motion for approval of the minutes.

Motion to second?

Motion for Jason, second for Ben.

All in favor?

Aye.

LRTP.

Apologies.

LRTP Yeah, that's better.

Awesome.

All right.

So I'll kick this off and then we'll turn it over to Alan.

I just want to make sure I say to this group, thank you very much for engaging in this process.

As you guys know, it is a long process, but nearing the end, we had a pretty major staff transition.

And the amount of detail that you guys read into this and sent all of your comments to make it a better draft, we really, really appreciate everything that you guys did to get this to where it finally is when it's before us to be approved.

So thank you for doing that.

All right.

Yeah, I'll echo that.

Thank you all for your careful review of this.

It's been very helpful.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

I have a quick presentation.

And I just want to make sure you all can see that.

OK.

All right.

So we're going to talk about revisions from the previous version that you all saw.

what the final draft looks like, next steps, there aren't many, and then questions if there are any.

So since the last meeting we had last month, we received over 80 suggested revisions from you all, the Citizens Advisory Committee, and the Policy Board.

And those include a more thorough discussion of the goals, objectives, lenses, performance metrics, and needs evaluation metrics we developed for the plan.

I'll also say we received these and we addressed them, so about 80 in total.

County staff.

There was a note in the version that you have in your packets that inaccurately stated the thresholds for the high, medium, and low need scores.

So the process that we used was a seven-point scale.

but the highest score was 5.07.

So we adjusted the scale.

So the highest scores were from three to 5.07.

Medium scores were from two to 2.9 and low scores were from zero to 1.9.

The version you have in your packets was going by the seven point scale.

And I had forgotten that we changed that a while ago.

So my apologies for that, but the updated version will have that language.

We have finalized versions of all the appendices, including project review pages, so a page each for each project with vicinity maps and more detail about each one.

We have a record of all public comments received, a few other things in those appendices.

I updated all the maps.

So there's new high res versions of every map that should be easier to read.

I changed the base map, the symbology for most things.

And I added additional maps of Charlottesville.

So zoomed in so you can see conditions in the city for pretty much every map.

New high res versions of all the charts and graphs.

So updates to the acknowledgement section and just some minor grammar and style edits throughout the document.

I believe we covered everything that was sent in to us.

It was really helpful to see you all's comments and make it a better document.

So the final draft that you have in your packets incorporates all those previously mentioned revisions.

It's fully overhauled.

The last version was just a Word document.

This one has been rehauled in InDesign, so it's more polished, a little more visually appealing, easier to read and navigate, hopefully.

Next steps.

So pending your recommendation, the policy board will vote on a resolution to adopt the plan later this afternoon.

As we mentioned before, the MPO may decide to revise the plan at any time.

While it must be adopted this month, there will be future opportunities to tweak the document if necessary.

And thank you all again for your valuable feedback, support, guidance throughout this process.

Appreciate it.

I have a question.

We've said the public comment period is open through today, right?

And so the last comment in here is from a week ago.

Correct.

And so what you guys would be looking to do today is make a recommendation to the policy board

Great, thank you all.

We want maybe make a change on the state of FDA?

We have a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Alright, our T.P.

is recommended for approval.

Yes, thank you.

First of all, check some of the problems that have been able to make it.

We have some outstanding plans, so I will do that.

I can't answer every question, but please be patient if I need to go back and get additional information.

Before I get started, I just want to introduce Lori, who's on the call today.

She's going to intern with me now.

She started yesterday, so I'm sure she's just finished her first year of school and has worked with her since she's been here.

So we're happy to have her on the call today.

All right, so I have a presentation for you, and then we have some time.

I'll go through it quickly, and then if you have questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

All right, so the first thing I want to do is, this is just a reminder of the projects that we had is coordinating the applications for the FBO.

These are some general updates on where we are in the process.

As you recall, there was an additional analysis that was seen over the history of the privacy war energy improvement study.

So we've been working on making sure that all that documentation and all of those studies are completed.

And then we are also preparing the US 250

Penthouse, Fort Worth Pentland study project applications.

Those are from a Pentland study that was completed two years ago in preparation for the Brown Bible Smart Tale.

And then the barracks are in that study.

And then if we need to go through the Albemarle community projects, I have those as well.

But I'm going to spend a little bit of time on the District I-64 interchange improvement because we have the public survey that was just last week.

So just to get everybody oriented, this is the current location on the 5th Street interchange.

This is what's there now.

And the reason that we are looking at the project in this location is that there are a high number of crashes on 5th Street through the interchange and then also on the eastbound ramp.

Definitely there are a handful of crashes.

There are also some capacity concerns, operational concerns along the street and on the eastbound ramp that we would like to be able to resolve in this project.

There are a number of needs that are identified through the statewide transportation plan, VTRAN, community intersection safety, congestion mitigation, bicycle, pedestrian, transit access, pedestrian safety improvements.

And so our goals are to improve the operations and safety and advance the total accessibility.

And then, just as a reminder, because I'm going to share some information with the survey results, but this is really an additional phase to public engagement that occurred for this project.

The Flint Street corridor study was the start of the day that was completed, I think it was either 2021 or 2021, but fairly recently.

And the diverging diamond interchange was tentatively identified that study as the preferred alternative for this location.

But the study did indicate that there needed to be some additional analysis and review of that for the alternatives.

So this was intended to provide some additional information.

This is a diagram that shows the location of the crashes.

These are rare in crashes.

There are a few other single crashes were offered based on the crashes.

And then this is an analysis of how operations may improve given the four different alternatives that were considered as part of the public engagement.

So I'll briefly go through what each of those studies were, but this row on the top

shows the volume to capacity analysis, which is going to show basically the operational improvements that could be realized for each of the different alternatives that are considered.

So the existing condition is 1.18, which means that the volume is currently exceeding capacity.

And then you can see that the volume over capacity ratios are reduced for the optimized diamond, the diverging diamond interchange, and the single coin burden interchange.

So those are how each of these alternatives would impact the operations.

The crash modification factor is basically a multiplier that you use to determine what the crash conditions are likely to be like with any of these alternatives that we grouped in.

They come up with what the current crashes are.

So the way you would

interpret this or use this and she would basically multiply this crash modification factor against the number of existing crashes that happened and that would be an indicator on what the impact is likely to the reduction in crashes.

So the lower this number, the fewer the number of crashes she would have.

So you can see for the optimized island, it would say

mostly the same.

For the DEI, it would decrease it by two-thirds, so you'd have a third of the number of crashes that you currently have.

And then for the stable point bourbon interchange, it would be a 40% reduction.

The sidewalk only concept, this would justify, this would be, one of the algorithms would basically keep the conditions the same as they are right now and add a sidewalk.

And so this crash modification factor only applies to the pedestrian crashes.

And so if we go back to this previous diagram, you can see that there was only one in the five-year period.

That's the only pedestrian related crash that occurred in the five-year period where this crash analysis took place.

It would have been like all of this is all measures considered in one so I don't

And then the relative class is just a given indicator of how sensitive each of these would be.

So smart scale includes not just the benefits, but also their cost.

So it gives you like a relative scale of which you can learn more from and which you can't learn.

Any questions?

Any other questions on the slide?

Okay.

So there were four alternatives.

We can go back to them.

But the first one was the diverging diamond scenario, which we have assumed to be the preferred alternative.

And so this scenario is a diverging diamond.

It includes

pedestrian or shared use path that would connect basically to the street housing trail project so it would tie it to the existing project that is under development now on this north end it would cross the ramp this would be signalized right here so there would be a traffic control right there where the bicycle pedestrian crossing would be the shared use path would be in the center of the diverging environment and then there would be a bicycle pedestrian

crossing at this southwest flag as well.

And the shared-use path will continue.

And I'll talk about the details of this at the end.

So this would improve operations by reducing the number of single phasos, providing the multiple connectivity, and increasing safety.

The second option that was considered as an optimized diamond, this was very similar to what's there right now, the differences in that.

Along Fifth Street, on both of the on-ramps onto 16th floor, you would be adding a right turn slip.

So you would basically have a free flow right turn onto these ramps in both directions.

And then it would add a second left bound lane, turning lane for people who are coming off of the exit on 16th floor.

There would be an additional left turn onto this street heading north, which would be

and then there was also the BPA sidewalk on both sides of the road.

So this is what they thought to the environment.

It does have some improvements to operations because of those findings that you found out.

The SPUI is the Single Point Urban Interchange, so basically the traffic control would be sort of, there would be a control via traffic control.

and that would monitor all that we missed.

You would have the people who were turning left onto the interchange in both directions.

That would be a single vehicle phase so you could make those opposing that turn at the same time.

But anybody who is making a left turn off of those streets onto 64, that would be a single phase.

So it does reduce the number of vehicle, or light phases, which would go through operations.

It also would require replacement of the bridge because it's a very wide project and could not fit into the footprint of the existing bridge, so it is the most consistent option.

And then there would be a shared use path on the west side of the street.

And then the final option that was presented as part of the survey is basically the existing condition and adding a sidewalk.

So for the purposes of this discussion, we can more or less call this the do not make option

The results of the survey is that we had nearly 1,000 survey participants and of those we had 935 comments that were received.

Each of the survey takers were able to use the sliding scale here to indicate how they would rate each of the options.

So you can see that on average, the diverging diamond interchange had the highest average score of all the circuit takers compared to the other options, including the existing conditions option with the sidewalk down.

So just a couple of things because I know this is probably something you all want to understand a little bit before there's any sort of action taken on this project.

We wanted to understand a little bit what some of the feedback was.

And so what we did was we did an analysis to determine how many people who commented.

So there were 868 people who, sorry, there were 967 people who filled out the survey, but then only a portion of them provided comments.

So we wanted to understand what the nature was of the comments.

So this slide right here is just showing

So out of 868 people who scored the DDI concept, 286 of them provided comments.

And so of those who provided a comment on the DDI in addition to just scoring it,

you can see that the highest majority of them, 42%, sported very low, 0 to 25.

And then 31% sported very high, so at least 6 to 100.

And the others were in the middle.

And you can see that, I mean, this is intuitive probably, what we would all assume, that based on the general feedback from the comments that we received, those who indicated the lowest numerical score also expressed the highest percentage of negative comments.

general tenor of the commons improved or increased or got more positive as the score range increased.

What was interesting is that there were still a lot of people who maybe scored this low but said this is kind of the best of a lot of options that I don't really like.

So there were still some positive options even if the score was really low.

And then there were still people who scored the DVI very positively but still have concerns.

And we can talk about what those are in the next frame.

We just got the survey results back on Friday, so I didn't have a lot of time to dive into all of these, but I ran these through an AI process out there to sort of get a sense of what the concerns were.

And so again, I want to iterate that this is only based on the comments that we received.

And so people who were commenting were people who had the more extreme positions on any of these specific

alternatives, not necessarily, and so it doesn't necessarily represent the overall concerns of those who took the survey, but those who took the survey and responded, this is the general sentiment of the comments that we received.

So you can see for the traditional diamond interchange, the general tenor was generally negative, same thing for the single point interchange, for the optimized diamond it was predominantly negative,

and then the divergent diamond was a little bit more mixed probably because people have some experience with those and so people are making their opinions based on their personal experience and predominantly so the comments still indicate that there was the highest level of support for the divergent diamond out of all the options that were presented with some additional concerns expressed.

I think very common through all of these were concerns about pedestrians and cyclists.

I think

this emerging diamond would be different than others in the area because the others in the area don't have pedestrian and bicycle accommodations through them.

So I think there is probably some additional effort that would need to go into educating people on how to interact with pedestrians and bicyclists around the area.

But I did want to give everybody a chance to understand what the feedback is.

And so based on this, we feel like both the

both based on the public feedback as well as looking at those technical analysis and the overall cost that the DVI does seem to be indicated as the most effective and most publicly acceptable solution or alternative for this interchange.

A couple of things that I just want to make sure that we review with you before there's

desire to take action or make a recommendation on this is that the shared use path would just be crossing these two legs.

Right now, that's because these two legs are, one, connecting to existing infrastructure that is being planned for bicycle and pedestrians or is already in existence.

And then also because these would be crossing at a signalized or controlled crossing.

These crossings on the opposite legs would be

under what is currently being designed as free-load conditions.

So the county had previously expressed a desire to see a connection to that northwest quadrant.

I can tell you why it's not included and maybe I'll let the county speak for their desires right now.

The reason it's not included is one, because

Right now, there is no pedestrian or facilities there.

And so part of SmartScale is that if we're going to put in some sort of improvement, it has to have a logical connection.

So once we make that crossing there, it has to connect to something and then we get into a situation where we would have to, for that to be an eligible feature of the application, we'd have to extend the shared-use path to the logical connection point.

The other thing is that there would need to be some sort of signalized control that's put into place in order to accommodate the cost of those rams.

When we were early in the stages of

planning the SmartScale project.

We were also dealing with some potential redevelopment in that northwest corner.

So we thought that it made sense to include a shared staff on that side.

But as that redevelopment has been progressing, there's a lot of topographical challenges right there, as well as as you move north, there's more challenges with Crete.

So I don't think it's the best use of funds moving forward.

The other thing I want to talk about is what's happening on this southwest line right here.

So the shared-use path will facilitate movement through the center of the DDI.

There is currently still some discussion on whether this is going to be a 12-foot wide area for the shared-use path or 14 feet, but regardless, the shared-use path itself is going to be 10 feet with concrete barriers on both sides.

So it will have like a physical, concrete protection from the traffic that's coming in.

So does that mean like between the path and the jersey barrier will have a foot or it's just a jersey barrier, which is I assume a foot, one?

I think

I'm not sure what exactly my consideration needs to be to make the distinction.

It could actually have more to do with the load bearing ability of the bridge, but that's kind of beyond my ability to respond to that.

But regardless, there will be a physical boundary barrier.

The other thing I want to talk about is on this south connection on the shared use path.

The shared-use path is planned to go to the point right here.

There's a driveway and then there's a sidewalk that picks up right there.

But one of the things we're not able to do is have a shared-use path that would terminate at a sidewalk without some sort of transition for bicyclists.

And so, parallel to the shared-use path of the south leg, there's going to be an off-ramp basically for bicycles.

So there will be a parallel pipeline that's being planned around here in order to transition bicycles from using the shared-use path into a shared roadway use with drivers.

Can you talk a little bit more about the northeast corner?

Yeah, we'll have to make sure that that's a safe crosswalk.

I don't think they're planning to like that right now, but they'll make sure that it meets all of the, you know, that that is a safe crosswalk based on the

The location of the private engineering team is pretty much following the PRO-AG, the public right of way access guidelines.

So they'll make sure that it meets all of those requirements.

Not like further into the development.

Yeah, it'll be out there.

Last question.

I don't go to the basement a lot of times and figuring out that particular hospital, but I feel like that's not insurmountable.

So that's the DDI.

I think the peer talks project we talk a lot about just as a refresher before there is a request for recommendations on some kind of applications.

This includes three accurate crossings of, let's see, one of those broken roads right here on the south and north leg, and then a crossing of 250 on the east side.

This will be, part of this will be rebuilding the signals in order to have a pedestrian pavement and crossing, crossing to

And then the other part of that application is the access management and turn lane improvements.

A little bit further down near Peterton Parkway, so they're going to close the median access to the Hilton Garden Inn right there.

So that would be a ride-in, ride-out.

And then they'll extend the left turn lane.

at Peter Jefferson Parkway, and then they will be implementing a group pet at Peter Jefferson Parkway intersection that will allow the vehicles coming from Peter Jefferson Parkway to make a left turn or a right turn, just not a group.

They just won't be able to go straight to the intersection.

And then there's also the DV vehicle, Garth and Ride, that we planned for this, that one for the bus loop.

We didn't realize that the arrows among us are backwards, so buses will do things from pan tops,

turn left here, be able to go into the park and ride.

There will be a staff facility right there with buses that pull in and drop off and pick up passengers.

And then they'll be able to commute through to access the place.

Any questions on this slide?

Okay.

And then the last one is the Barracks Road corridor improvements.

One thing I want to mention about this project is just that the

is still being designed.

So I think that the latest I heard is that this might be reduced down coming out of the roundabout and very west onto Georgetown.

This might be reduced to a single lane because right now there's only one lane further down and this right lane would basically only be for people coming into the housing.

So that's one of the change.

All of the access points or the median crossings between Georgetown and the interchange of a little bit of south here are going to be closed.

The lanes are going to be reduced I think to 11 feet in both directions.

The median is also going to be reduced in order to make space for the shared use path on the existing right-of-way.

County and are working to make sure that there are two concrete pads for future installation of transit stops at the Georgetown Road stop.

That may mean that they have to move the stop a little bit in order to accommodate that, but have a transit shelter there.