MPO Technical Committee Meeting   2/18/2025

I'm going to be running a meeting from the podium so you may hear me step away or get closer to the microphone as we're going through this.

Yeah, I would like to introduce...

Sorry about that.

Just to have it, I would like to introduce Taylor Jacobs.

She's the new transportation director at the TJPDC.

Hi, everyone, and sorry for those online that can't see me.

But this is Taylor Jenkins.

I started last month with the PDC as a director of transportation.

And I came here from Michael Baker International, which is an engineering and consulting firm.

I am originally based out of Richmond.

So I'm from Richmond.

And I've been commuting, but I'm moving down here this weekend, actually, which is really exciting.

And before then, I spent about four years with the state of Virginia with the Department of Rail and Public Transportation as a transit planner.

I also spent just about a year doing state park planning, so I had a nice little detour there.

I'm doing some really cool work, but transportation is obviously my passion.

So really excited to stay in the field and to be able to serve you all in this way.

All right, now we all know Taylor.

We will do our call to order and attendance.

I'm Kellie Brown.

I'm here, sorry, I was trying to get my sound to work right.

Sandy Shackelford, Christine Jacobs, Sarah Simba, Jason Espie,

Bill Palmer?

Mitch Huber?

Here.

Thank you.

Sarah Pennington?

Garland Williams.

All right.

Thank you, Gorjan.

And I think we have to vote to accept the remote participation of our members.

So I'll take a motion to accept the remote participation of our members.

And a second?

Second.

Thank you.

All in favor, say aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right.

Thank you.

Then we are going to move on to matters from the public.

Anyone from the public want to speak today?

Awesome.

All right.

Going to move along to general admin.

First, we're going to take a vote on acceptance of the agenda.

Anyone want to give a motion to accept the current agenda as shown?

All right.

First.

Thank you.

All in favor, say aye.

All opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right.

Moving along to approval of the December meeting minutes.

Can I have a motion to approve the December meeting minutes if there are no edits or changes?

All right.

Got a first and a second.

All in favor say aye.

All opposed say nay.

And an extension.

Thank you, Lonnie.

All right, my first meeting and you all already get a presentation out of me.

So today we're going to talk about the Fiscal Year 26 Unified Planning Work Program draft and hopefully get some feedback from you all.

I forgot that you were.

Thank you.

So a little bit about the background of the UPWP.

It identifies all of the transportation planning activities that will be done by MPO staff for the next fiscal year, starting on July 1st, ending July 30th of the next year.

And it identifies the major regional priorities and deliverables for the member localities that we would be working on.

Next slide.

So federal legislation requires that the metropolitan planning process with the MPO addresses the following 10 planning factors.

In the last UPWP, there were eight of these outlined, but current legislation identifies these 10 and they include safety, maintenance, security, environmental quality.

The two that are in there that are new that were updated this year were resiliency and reliability and travel and tourism.

And so in addition to those that were already identified, the ones that you see in blue down at the bottom there are ones that we recommend adding to the next fiscal year's UPWP as a priority for the transportation planning activities.

So the last LRTP that was done that was updated was in fiscal year 24.

And as part of that process, there was extensive public outreach that was done for that plan for the community to come to a shared vision

and shared lenses for the transportation system in the region.

And so we recommend just bringing the UPWP in alignment with that.

And that would include adopting the following frameworks that are identified on the screen for equity, quality of life, climate action and land use.

So the funding sources for the UPWP, it's primarily federal funds, so 80% federal, and those funds come from the Federal Highway Administration administered through VDOT, those are the PL funds, and then funds from the Federal Transit Administration that's administered through DRPT.

And we also receive funds from VDOT State Planning and Research bucket of money, and that additionally will be identified in the budget that you'll see on the next slide.

All right, so this is the main table and all of this will be available in the UPWP file that you all will get to review that was in the meeting packet.

And so this identifies where the funds are coming from from each program and the portion of the funding that we will get.

And so everything that you see in red is just an estimate.

I believe those are just last year's numbers that we included in there.

We will not get the actual values for this amount until around April possibly.

And so once we're ready to adopt the final, these will be updated and you all will see those updated numbers.

But for budgeting purposes, the ones in red are from last year.

So those are last year's funds.

For funding by task, and so we have three different buckets that we carried over from the last UPWP.

And so the first is program administration, and that includes things like invoicing, reporting, staffing all of the committees.

Task two is long range transportation planning, and that is at 30% of the total budget.

And that specifically is less than the last one that we adopted, specifically because we don't have an LRTP update that we'd be doing next fiscal year.

And so that amount is a little bit lower as far as the percentage.

And then for task three, short range planning, that's about 45% of the budget.

A couple of the administrative changes that we wanted to call out for you all for this UPWP update.

We specifically removed line item budgets from this draft of the UPWP to be more in line with what we see other MPOs doing across the state and to reduce the administrative burden on the staff if there was something that were to go outside of one of those line item budget items.

So an example of that would be if we went over a certain percentage, I can't remember exactly what the percentage is,

We would have to go back and do a UPWP update to bring that back in line, but we still have the line item budgets that we will maintain internally.

This would just allow us to have a little bit more flexibility and reduce that burden for the staff in case any of those changes were to occur.

And so we also increased the amount going toward the admin budget, so task one.

Historically, I think the MPO has underestimated a little bit of the time commitment that was required to maintain a lot of these staffing, so staffing committees, having those materials together.

And so we slightly increased that to hopefully come more in line with how the actual budget looked year to year.

And then we just had a couple name changes that we wanted to call to your attention as well.

The most significant would be for short range planning, still focusing on a lot of the same tasks, but really calling it out so that it's more clear to anyone reviewing it, to staff, that these are the activities that would fall within that task.

And here is the proposed line item budget that we would be using internally to manage the different subtask items that we have under each task.

And so for the first one, program administration, that includes things like the general administration for reporting, staffing committees for 1C, public outreach, public participation in Title VI.

That is specifically for maintaining those documents.

And if we ever have to issue like a public notice or anything like that, we wanted to make sure that that was captured in there

where if we had any sort of update from DRPT or VDOT that was requested to those plans, there would be a place captured in the UPWP to do that work.

Information sharing and professional development.

We specifically wanted a subtask where staff would be able to attend things like the quarterly MPO meetings through OIP, any CTB meetings, any recurring meetings that really help staff stay up to date on transportation in the region and be able to pass that information on to others.

And I should ask, are there any questions?

Okay.

I would just add also in the admin and going up in that percentage, we have never written into our UPWP things like a laptop replacement for MPO staff that is an eligible reimbursement expense.

We've just always done it administratively.

So it also includes things like technology or software or

technical training like GIS.

We'll get a tiny bit larger.

Yeah, of course.

For task two for long range planning, so all of the long range planning activities, so you're thinking multiple years into the future would fall under this task.

And so that would include the comprehensive safety action plan, which staff are currently working on right now.

And that's due for mid fiscal year 26 completion.

The travel demand model update is captured in here.

Staff are also currently working on that.

The travel demand management study is an item in here.

The Coordinated Human Services Mobility Plan update, that is the CHISM plan that is completed by DRPT every certain number of years.

And we know that that update is coming and that MPO staff might have some level of involvement with that.

We're not sure exactly what that scope looks like yet, but we wanted to make sure it was captured in there in case there were any items that staff would need to support with.

And then for the long range transportation plan, if there were any revisions or amendments to projects or anything in that document, staff would be able to do that under that sub task.

For Task 3 short range planning, this is where we anticipate most of the work happening for fiscal year 26.

And so that would include any sort of TIP amendments, processing annual things for the TIP would be captured in there, SMART SCALE, STARS, Project Pipeline, specifically offering technical assistance to our member localities would fall under that bucket.

Regional travel demand management, transit and rail planning, human services planning, bike ped support, that would fall under this task, annual performance targets, and then any special studies, projects, programs.

The first draft was presented today and by extension to VDOT and DRPT staff to be able to review and provide their comments.

Next week, the draft will be presented to the NPO Policy Board for their feedback.

On March 19th, we have CTAC that will receive

An initial draft we have an opportunity to comment and then we will start addressing all the feedback that we've gotten from you all and you'll see the final draft for recommendation to the policy board on April 13th and hoping we would get adoption on April 23rd.

And so by that time we should have all of the final budget numbers to be able to update in that plan and we would be looking for your feedback and your comments from now probably up until maybe about a week or two before

I think that might be the last slide.

Okay.

Any other questions?

Just sort of, could you send out like a reminder maybe a few days before you want comments back?

All right.

Thank you, Taylor.

We're going to move along next to Sarah is going to give us an update on the Title VI plan.

And it looks like we do have a vote on whether to recommend this to the MPA Policy Board at the end of this.

and the staff memo.

And the purpose of bringing this memo to you today is to update the Terrace Jefferson planning and recognition and Charlottesville, Albemarle, Mitch Huber, and the planning and recognition of the privacy and implementation of the plan.

As we know, any agency that receives

Federal Financial Assistance must comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So the TJPDC and the Shallowview Alomar Metropolitan Organization adopted their Title VI implementation plan back in December 6 on December 6 of 2022.

So this Title VI describes the measures that

will be undertaken to comply with Title VI.

Title VI is a reminder of Olivia's discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

So recently, CA-MPO staff received a request from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, DRPT, to update the Title VI plan to include certain requirements for specific dependencies.

TJPDC staff works with the DRPT closely, as well as with their consultants to develop a revised plan for public comment.

This updated draft has been made available for comments for aluminum printing based since February 4th and this is open until February 26th for

The draft is being presented to you today for review, comments, and consideration for a recommendation to this kind of policy board for plan adoption.

So the policy board will review, comment, and consider this adoption at the meeting next week on February 26th meeting.

So far we have not received any comments yet.

That's a good question.

Yeah, it's clear in the memo, too.

It's mentioned there.

It's the appendices.

Yes.

All of the appendices were added.

OK.

Did you hear that?

Our organization will talk about that later.

All right, so it sounds like minor updates except for all the appendices that were added to this.

Sorry, I'm just going to keep asking questions.

It seems like the appendices are really just documenting things that were already in place.

But things like the complaint forms.

Yes.

OK.

So there's nothing major.

Yes.

A lot of the data was put into here that may not be written into the narrative.

But yes, there's nothing in here that's like a substantive change on what our processes will be, how we will reach these populations.

Sounds good.

I have a question.

Please.

I apologize for my ignorance.

No.

So I know particularly where I am in the rural area, we have significant African-American populations that are historic communities.

And how do we, as transportation programs

So she's the one that does this plan and then make sure that we follow this plan so we can reach out to her.

I think one of the challenges, if I can just speak transparently off the cuff and hopefully not get us in trouble,

One of the challenges is the requirements in the plan are to, for example, advertise in particular types of publications that in Charlottesville don't exist any longer.

So for years and years, we were having to advertise in a Richmond paper because it meant a certain population, even though they weren't even within our region and were not going to engage in our activities.

And so I think one of the challenges is there is no particular publication that we can advertise in that specifically targets those communities.

So it requires a different type of outreach.

It requires relying on organizations, relying on partnerships, relying on nonprofits to help us with that type of outreach.

And it is said that I think one of our projects, I mean, mostly at Blue Ridge, we are identifying with something a lot.

It's a very low percentage.

And that seems to be the project that we're going to do.

Sorry, I do have one other question.

Has this already been reviewed by DRPT to ensure that does satisfy their... No.

Okay.

Any other questions?

I do have a motion from Jessica.

Second?

Second.

Thank you, Lonnie.

All in favor of sending the recommendation to the policy board, say aye.

Aye.

Any abstentions?

OK. That one passes along.

And we can move on to our next item, which is informational.

It is on the ITTF button.

Go ahead.

So we have the pleasure of having Mr. Michael Fontaine from the Virginia Transportation Research Council.

He will present on the innovation

and Technology Transportation Fund, the SMART Intersection Project for Albemarle County.

Thanks, everyone.

I appreciate the invitation to come talk.

This is a little bit of deja vu for me.

In the late 90s, I was City Traffic Engineer for Charlottesville for

A couple of years and I was on this panel and I don't think I've been in the PDC building since I left the city, so it's been a while.

Much nicer facility now than it was when I was at the city.

So I'm going to talk about our smart intersection deployment pilot, which is going to include four intersections in Albemarle County that might be of interest to you all.

So I don't need to probably tell this group this, but obviously intersection safety is a big issue in Virginia.

It's one of our emphasis areas in our State Strategic Highway Safety Plan.

What we see is a large portion of fatalities and injuries are during the intersections, especially for vulnerable road users.

Bike and pedestrian crashes are especially overrepresented at intersections.

So what we're looking at is a smart intersection technology that will hopefully help us address both safety and operational issues at these intersections.

So what do I mean when I talk about smart intersections?

So basically what we've seen in the last five years or so is there's been tremendous advances in machine vision, radar, and lidar as detection systems at intersections.

So far more sophisticated than typical video detection that we use in our intersections today, where we can actually identify different users of the intersection with these technologies and track their trajectory through the intersection.

And so this opens up a lot of opportunities for us beyond just traditional traffic signal control for us to understand what's happening there.

And so one of the things that it can do is since we're tracking trajectories of different users, we can actually look at near-miss events.

So often when we deal with safety, we're a very reactive mode.

We wait for crashes to happen, and then we try and fix them.

And so this is going to allow us to look at where there's risky behaviors before a potentially tragic event happens and hopefully be a little bit more proactive.

Also, by being able to track trajectories of vehicles, we can do things with the signal controller to potentially improve operations.

If we see that it looks like someone's going to run the red light, maybe we hold all red a little bit longer so that we don't have potential safety conflicts at the intersection.

And then as we move into a more connected world, we see opportunities for us to transmit information from the infrastructure directly in the vehicle.

So right now,

We've got about 25 intersections in Northern Virginia that are broadcasting signal phase and timing data out.

Then if you drive certain high-end Audis, it'll tell you when the lights get ready to turn red.

So you're not, you know, hopefully adjusting your speed so that you're not hitting that red light.

And if we continue on the trajectory that we've got, if we see that there's like a pedestrian in the intersection, we could potentially transmit that morning to a vehicle once the automated vacuums are at that capability.

So there's a lot of opportunities here.

So our pilot is funded by the Innovation and Technology Transportation Fund, which was established by the General Assembly.

Basically the idea here with ITTF is to try and pilot high technology projects that could improve one of these areas that got listed on the slide.

And so back in 2022, ITTF allocated a million dollars for us to perform a pile of smart intersections to try and look at how they could improve safety and mobility.

So basically the way we've set this up is in two phases.

Our first phase ended last fall, used about half the money.

And basically what we did is we did a market scan, found four technologies that looked to be the most promising, and then deployed them on two intersections in Fairfax County where we had a high level of connectivity.

And so the idea here was to put these technologies out in parallel so that they're exposed to the same kinds of conditions, same environmental situation.

And we can see which one of these seem to hold up.

Because as we all know, what the vendors claim and what we see in reality are sometimes very different things.

And particularly when you put something out in the elements for a prolonged period of time, sometimes the words on the technology tend to start to show up.

And where we're at now is in phase two, where we're going to take the most promising opportunities, most promising technologies we saw in phase one, and we're expanding that deployment to four more intersections in Salem district and four in Culpeper district.

Warren Culpepper District are all in Albemarle County, which is why this group is potentially interested in it.

And so I did want to acknowledge our lead researchers that are working on this is the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Mike Mollenhauer and Richard Ray.

We work with them quite a bit on technology integration projects where they're very used to getting their hands on and doing that hardware integration and working with advanced technology.

So they've been great partners in this project for us.

All right, so I do want to talk a little bit about what we saw in Fairfax before we talk about what we're going to be doing here in Albemarle.

So we tested on Route 29 in Notley and Route 50 in Notley in Fairfax County.

We looked at four different systems.

One was a LIDAR-based system that cost about $36,000 per intersection.

We looked at two different machine vision systems that both cost about $18,000 in intersection.

And then we looked at a fourth one that combined machine vision and radar and did a sensor fusion.

That was about $36,000 per intersection.

And so what we did first is we basically deployed these out there.

They were all running in parallel.

They were not integrated with the traffic signal.

So the traffic signal was still using its traditional detection to run the signal.

They were just kind of in offline data collection mode.

And so we were looking at, could it count vehicles and bikes and pedestrians accurately?

So could it identify users of the intersection accurately?

And particularly, we were very data poor when it comes to bike and pedestrian data.

And so we were very interested, especially in how that looked.

And then we went to look at, okay, when it identified safety critical events, did those look to be accurate?

Was it able to identify near misses and things like that in a way that was consistent, reliable?

And so we did some ground truth video data collection to do that validation.

So basically the way this all kind of

And what it looked like is at the intersection we worked with the vendors to try and identify where the equipment had to be placed to get everything to collect it.

We've got a picture on the right that kind of shows the massive array of sensors that ended up getting deployed at the end.

This is not what's going to happen in Albemarle County because this is four systems all installed together.

We're only going to be doing one system that looked to be the best performing when we get to Albemarle County.

And so we configured the systems with the vendor help.

So the upper left-hand corner is basically what the configuration looks like for the LiAR system.

So it's kind of essentially creating a point cloud and tracking vehicles through the intersection.

The bottom left is basically a video detection system used like a fisheye camera.

So they have to translate the fisheye view into what's happening at the intersection.

And then on the right is how we set up our independent video verification system.

So we could look at

Are the systems working properly using an independent data stream to make sure everything's working right?

All right, so I'm going to show you some examples of what we can get out of these systems.

So this is actually what is being generated by the system that's going to go in place here in Albemarle County.

So I'm purposefully not using any vendor names because I don't want to give the impression that VDOT is endorsing or not endorsing any vendor here, but this will give you a flavor of what we can get with this system.

So this is going to be a case where

The system automatically detected a crash at the intersection.

So you can certainly think of a case where if this works, we could rapidly notify EMS or the police to respond to something like this.

So we're going to see a case here where the vehicle turning left here has a green arrow and a vehicle is going to come from above the screen, running the red light and strike the vehicle.

And so that is alerted in real time.

Some other things we can do, wrong way driving.

So here's a case where

There is a driveway on the left side of the screen here that you cannot get into because of the media.

And this person, I'm not sure if they were impaired or made a conscious decision to go the wrong way down the road, but they did this and were to access the driveway that goes to the shopping center here.

And this is at 9 p.m. at night.

This isn't at 2 a.m. or anything.

This is something that, you know, but we're able to pick that up automatically.

Looking at near misses.

So this is where I think we've got a lot of power here where, you know,

Crashes are rare in random events.

Near misses are much more common and give us an opportunity to identify what's going to happen.

So you can see here that white SUV kind of didn't stop or yield at all, blew right through that turn and was almost struck by the vehicles coming through.

And so when we look at, we can do this for vulnerable road users.

This one is a case where I'm not going to try and excuse this pedestrian's behavior because this is probably

One of the most dangerous things I've seen in the video, but the approach that he's crossing is the only leg of this four-leg intersection that doesn't have a marked crosswalk.

And so I think we're kind of seeing to some degree the behavior of the pedestrians are going to take the shortest path and not go three legs around.

But what this person chose to do is clearly a bad decision.

So you can see they're basically going to frog their way through traffic here and watch this red truck, how much the nose dips when he breaks to avoid hitting.

And so this again, you know, this is the kind of thing where this is not going to be captured on our crash reports that behavior like this is happening, but we can get something like this from these systems.

And so we can compile this data and this starts to give us some deep maps where we can look at where we're starting to see conflicts and near-miss events.

And so one thing I'll point out, I don't know, I guess we won't show, but if you look at kind of the upper right-hand quadrant, that's where we have the near-miss between the vehicle turning right and the three vehicles.

We've got a fairly gradual turning radius on the intersection there that kind of encourages people to try and make right turns at high speed.

And so there might be a design solution to try and deal with some of these things.

It could be a case where we've made it where it's too easy to be going 35 miles an hour and make that right turn.

And so maybe there's a design solution.

And you can filter this by time of day.

So maybe there's something to do with signal operations that you want to address, or maybe you see problems where the police officer ought to be out here at certain times of day in order to address some of these issues.

So this gives us some tools analytically that we can start to try and address problems.

All right, so getting to the validation of what we did in Fairfax.

Basically what we did is try to look at a mix of light and weather conditions because we know light and weather can impact the different systems differently.

Basically what we found is the LiDAR system really did not work very well in the rain.

You know, basically if you're using scanning LiDAR and you're spinning that beam of light, a little bit of rain is enough to cause everything to degrade quite a bit.

The system that combined machine vision and radar also had a lot of problems mainly because of the radar where it would lose tracks of individuals as it went through the intersection.

So when we started looking at the counts, it significantly overcounted everything because it would count the same person like three times because it would lose it and then pick it back up again and stuff like that.

So the two vision-based systems seem to work pretty well.

In particular, the vendor B here seemed to be the best of the bunch when it comes to how well it counted cars as well as how well it counted the bikes and the pens.

Generally, counting bikes and pens was more challenging for these systems just because of the variety of users that you would have at the intersection.

But we were still able to get within 10% in most cases, which is a lot better than what we've got now, which is no counts at all.

So it certainly looked good.

Now looking at the safety analytics, basically I'm going to focus on the best performing machine vision system here, where basically what we did is we looked at the events that were flagged by the system and then had a human observer look at it and say, okay, does this appear to be legitimate?

And so we looked at it through two lenses.

First one is, was the event detected accurately based off of the criteria that the vendor used?

So is it a near miss?

And if they're saying near misses you're within

Two seconds of potentially hitting each other were within two seconds of a potential conflict.

And generally speaking, the systems performed pretty well there.

The one that performed the worst was the wrong way detection system.

And what was interesting there is the biggest problem they had is car carriers carrying cars that were facing backwards were picked up as wrong way vehicles that would drive down the road and the cars on the back of the truck were going the wrong way.

So then we also looked at subjective relevance.

So in this case, we looked at this and said,

OK, not every case that's a near miss is really a safety problem.

I mean, there's going to be cases where perhaps there's a pedestrian crossing.

They're making eye contact with the driver.

They kind of are negotiating who's got the right of way.

And so maybe the vehicle is stopping or slowing down or waving the person through.

And technically, it meets the criteria of a near miss.

But really, it wasn't a safety problem.

And so what we see is that, generally speaking, while this is good at giving us an initial indication, it's not 100% accurate.

There's a lot of things that aren't necessarily true safety events that are flagged, but it gives us a good starting point to review the kinds of issues that are occurring at the intersection.

Okay, so let's talk about how we're moving on with phase two here.

So phase two, we're basically taking the lessons we learned in Fairfax and expanding installation across a broader cross-section of sites.

And so really what we're trying to do is stress test these systems in what I would say are more challenging situations.

So we've got four sites in Montgomery County.

Probably the one that I'm most interested to see what happens is we've got one at Beamer and Southgate, right by Lane Stadium, if you've been to Virginia Tech.

So there'll probably be some good data there on football game days for us to look at.

We've been working with Culpeper District here in Albemarle

So right now we're looking at Alderman McCormick, which obviously this is an intersection very close to my office where you see every type of non-motorized and motorized user that you can see through there.

I saw someone on a monowheel probably going way too fast for that intersection the other day.

So that'll be an interesting one to look at both driver and pedestrian and e-spooter behavior through there.

We'll be looking at hydraulic and lambs, which is right by Albemarle High School.

That one's also going to be interesting because the county's installed a speed camera system there, and so I think that's going to be an interesting overlay to see how behavior changes there.

We're tentatively planning to look at ivy and old ivy, just because there's a very interesting intersection geometry at that location.

The problem we've got there, though,

is we're in the middle of a structural review where there's a lot of equipment already on those mast arms there.

And it probably, it may or may not be able to take the additional equipment we want to install there.

So that's probably the one that's most likely to change for us when we're sort of going through structural review right now.

And then we're looking at Route 29 and the overpass of Rio Road.

And so this is one where we're really testing like a very wide intersection.

How well do they handle when they've got a very expansive intersection, a lot of space to try and cover for detection and warning.

And so for the assessment, VTTI is going to be installing an independent video verification system that we'll be using.

We're again going to look at detection accuracy and the safety critical event accuracy like we did before.

But what's going to be new that we're going to be doing here in Albemarle as well as in Salem District is we're going to be looking at how can these systems interact with the traffic signal controller.

So right now the traffic signals are going to be running using their traditional detection system.

going to be during this test integrating the technology into the controller because that provides us more power where if the controller can tell the system, okay, the light's red now, now I can start to do things like maybe if I see that someone's going to run the red light and hold the all red longer, I could do a green extension.

If I detect that there's a pedestrian in the crosswalk and I'm getting ready to go out of the walk phase, maybe I extend the,

The walk phase longer.

So there's a lot of things we can do on the signal controller side if we can integrate this in.

And then the other piece to all this is for those of you that have worked with VDOT, cybersecurity for all of our operational technology issues is our systems is always kind of a high priority.

And so obviously any opportunity where this could create potential security risks is being reviewed.

And so that's going to be critical for us moving forward is to ensure that we can satisfy our Operational Technology Division and move forward with that.

So we're currently working a lot with Culpeper District working through all this.

So timeline, basically we're in the middle of procurement right now.

So one of the good things about having Virginia Tech involved is their procurement is a whole lot easier than state procurement.

So they're purchasing the systems.

We're working on installation with the districts.

We're hoping to have everything installed by June of 2025.

We'll have everything up through January 2026 for evaluation and assessment.

We do want to make sure that we capture different weather conditions, lighting conditions.

How's it working in snow?

Is it going to start to have maintenance issues that's up there long enough?

So we're trying to look at things like that.

And then at the end of all this, we're going to basically handle the transition of the system from Virginia Tech, kind of run system over to VDOT in May of 2026.

That's a very cool presentation.

I guess what I'm thinking of right now is kind of like a Venn diagram ahead of safety, operations, and enforcement.

And you can't have all three.

If you make it the most safe, you might make operations less if you do all the enforcement and stuff.

So I guess let me maybe try and try to answer that from a few different ways.

So first of all, I want to, I probably should have mentioned this earlier,

There is no enforcement of any systems, so this would not be used like a red light running camera or anything like that.

So police cannot use this data at all if there's a crash.

So that's one of the things that we're trying to work through with this.

So right now all the videos I showed you are stored on the vendor cloud.

VDOT has a policy not to store video because they don't want to be getting a million FOIA requests from lawyers because of the manpower requirements needed to respond to all that.

And so that's one of the things that we've been talking about is like, we would love to know the derived information from the video, but it's only a can of worms to keep the video itself.

And so it is a balancing act where

The video is very useful for us in understanding the behaviors, and there's good engineering reasons to have that.

But the administrative challenges of keeping the video are significant when we're talking about that.

So from the VDOT perspective, operations and safety are both obviously very important.

And so I think where we've been operating up to this point is

I think our signal operations have tended to skew more towards the operations side of the house rather than the safety side of the house, simply because we don't have a lot of good, we're relying on the crash data.

And the crash data is a very coarse kind of metric for us to use.

And so something like this, you know, often we see operations and safety go hand in hand.

You know, a well-operating traffic signal tends to have fewer crashes than a poorly operated traffic signal.

But that's from the vehicular side.

The cases where we've got a large number of unbelievable users, you may have a different skew in priority.

So like the Aldermen-Cormick intersection, I think is a great case here where you have so many bicycle, pedestrian, e-scooter traffic there that the consequence of an unsafe behavior there is very severe with those users there.

And that's different than talking about an intersection where you have marginal, you know, BRU traffic.

So I think that's something that as we're getting this data, I think the districts are trying to look at this and try and figure out, okay, how can I really use this?

And certainly there's a lot of value for us on crash diagnostics.

So when we're looking at like an HSIP kind of project, this gives us a lot of insight we wouldn't necessarily have just by, you know, if I could look at an intersection, maybe I've got four crashes here.

Well, I've had four crashes, it's hard to really say what's going on, you know, but if I've got 150 near misses, that maybe gives me enough

Data, and I start to feel confident in the results that I've got.

So a great, great question.

So following up on that, I guess, in terms of the direct changes you would make to the signal controller, examples you gave were like holding the all red, extending the pedestrian signal.

Are there any operational benefit changes?

So, you know, that's something that again, you know, we got to get further into the work before we really start looking at that.

You know, there's a lot of work out there that has kind of looked at a high penetration connected vehicle world where we know the true trajectory of all the vehicles coming in and you can really do a lot of great things and optimizing the signal to make sure you're not getting stops on red and things like that.

The great thing about this is that we're getting all the vehicles so it's not like we're waiting for vehicle connectivity to get here but we've got a field of view that's kind of limited to only a couple hundred feet from the intersection and so I think that's one of the things that we're trying to look at is what are really our opportunities given that it's not like we're knowing what's happening a thousand feet from the intersection we'll probably know what's happening within 500 feet and so

That's something I'd say is further down the line that we do.

So let me be clear.

We're not going to actually change how the signals are operating in the pilot.

We're basically running that logic offline.

We're essentially looking at a, it's going to run as normal.

We're going to take the system,

using this detection and look at how we could have run this system in order to evaluate it because we don't want to turn something loose on a live road without properly vetting this.

So we've got opportunity to do hardware in the loop, you know, kind of work here where it's not going to actually change the signal.

The actual operations will remain as they always happen.

So we don't want to put something out there in operation until we've got full confidence that it's going to behave as intended.

Things look great on the computer, but when you put them with the actual hardware in the cabinet, interesting things can happen.

This is a pod right now, so I'm expecting to be able to use it, but in the future, is this intended so that when we do SmartSCALE or when you're sharing applications, we can use data from these intersections to make our case better for our safety issues.

We don't have, we don't have, like I say, we only have four crashes, but we don't,

There's near misses or there's speeding or there's stuff here that happens all the time because we don't want to wait for a person to die for us to actually be able to do something.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that that's really kind of the vision for something like this.

Now, obviously, during the course of the pilot, if someone in Albemarle County is interested in looking at one of these intersections for SmartScale, we're happy to share the information with them.

It's certainly

I mean, we're probably not going to be able to share the disaggregated information with you, but we can share the summary statistics, and I think that could be additional information you can use for your application.

You know, obviously, ideally, we're getting this data more systematically throughout all of our intersections.

We've only got four intersections here in the county where we've got this, but we tried to pick them based off of locations where we thought there was something interesting and where, you know, some of these I think are in PSAP or worse, so I think that,

So right now the problem is like for a long time VDOT had the philosophy of if you build it they will come with connected vehicles and we built it and they never came and so that's something I would say is maybe 10-20 years now from now when the

OEMs start to get there.

Right now, there's a very, very small subset of mainly high-end luxury vehicles that can ingest the kind of information that we're broadcasting.

The prior administration put a lot of emphasis on trying to expand our ability to do that with the idea being that if we provide the infrastructure, the OEMs will come and start building into their cars.

Who knows what's going to happen with the current DOT administration if that's going to be, continue to be an emphasis area.

I think what we're focusing on generally right now is with our Connected Vehicle Program is trying to find places where we can make a difference with a small penetration.

And so it's not going to be explicitly part of this project, but we're going to basically look at, okay, how could we take these messages and broadcast them out if we get to a point where we do have enough vehicles out there where this could be an event.

But to me, I think that's where he starts the payoffs for stuff like this is being able to push those alerts and warnings in vehicles for someone if there is a safety issue.

Yeah, right.

I know it's outside of scope, but I mean, it's sort of along those lines.

I mean, anyone who doesn't use Google Maps or anything like that, I don't know if it's because of the proprietary information they can't share, but they know when a traffic intersection is blocked out going a certain direction.

It's all a subnet data.

So that's a great question.

It's a little bit different than this project.

So we actually have a project right now where there's some data vendors out there that will essentially sell you trajectory information.

So the generic example is OnStar.

If you have a GM vehicle, even if you're not paying for OnStar service, your location every three seconds is being sent back to GM.

GM is taking that data and selling it to third-party data aggregators that agencies can buy.

So right now we've got a pilot right now where the problem is it's not every vehicle out there.

It's generally around five to eight percent of vehicles are available in these data sets.

And so we actually have a pilot with about 250 intersections in the state now where we're using this data and

It's hard to look at real-time performance because the sample size is so low, but you can aggregate that information and look at signal performance if you sum over enough time.

And so that's been pretty powerful for us.

So in VDOT, we have what are called automated traffic signal performance measures.

So it's a controller-based way to look at arrivals on green and arrival on red and things like that.

And we can use this probe data from the car companies to get that same kind of information if we don't have the infrastructure someplace at the signal to do that.

And so that's been useful for us.

I know like in Salem District, they've used that to look at cross-jurisdictional traffic signal issues, because I think to the average member of the public, they don't care if it's a city or a VDOT signal on the corridor.

And sometimes the

VDOT in the city don't share information as much as we would like to truly improve operations.

And so this gives us a way to consistently work across all signal systems.

So that information is out there.

We've got a separate evidence looking at them.

We have to find pedestrian data too.

So we have, so one of the hats I wear is Virginia is part of something called the Eastern Transportation Coalition, which used to be the I-95 border coalition.

And so I'm chair of their traffic data validation group.

And so every state on the Eastern Seaboard wants bike and pet data because we're so data-poor there.

And the problem we've got is the data vendors that are out there like Strava are biased in some way because it's people who are exercising.

It's not necessarily daily walkers and things like that.

And then the other issue we had is there's a lot of vendors out there that were essentially mining cell phone location-based services data.

Apple and Google started tightening up their user agreements where they weren't sharing as much data.

And then what started happening in the data marketplace is that it started tightening.

And the people that were selling the raw data to the vendors that were generated by competitive accounts, let's just say there was incentives to create synthetic data, not real data to keep the money flowing.

So an example would be like when the key bridge collapsed in Maryland.

And they found out quickly which data vendors were faking data because cars were still driving across the bridge after it collapsed.

So the problem we've got with the bike and ped data is the data we trust, like Strava, is a biased example.

Other vendors are putting their black box secret sauce on the raw data and then giving something to you.

And the problem is that the data they're using to train their machine learning models to come up with bike and ped counts

is derived from the bike and ped counts that public agencies are generating and posting on the internet.

And so they do a great job of matching our count data.

But if you look at another location where we don't post count data and you do like a short term study and try and compare it to what the vendors have, it's all over the map.

So I think the bike and ped data is lagging.

I think they're trying to catch up and there's a lot of sort of national level efforts to try and look at the data, but it's,

I would say buyer beware with a lot of the stuff that's out there, right?

But everybody wants it.

So as they look at this, so for these pilot products, I know you talked a little bit about your selection of sites.

Did you look at things like pedestrian data about honoring their fatalities?

So what we did, so I guess there are multiple layers to it.

So we worked with the district and what we did is we tried to look at, we want to look at vulnerable road user utilization.

We did look at the crash data, but then we had some very technical things like, is there a controller cabinet there with enough space for us to put more things in?

Or, you know, what do we think is the,

The likelihood of us being able to get the detection on the mask arm and be able to work in a reasonable way.

So it was a combination of the safety driven metrics, overall utilization by different users, as well as sort of the technical requirements in the system.

And we were confined to the VDOT system for this as well.

Now that being said, you know, when we did the work in Fairfax,

City of Falls Church saw what we were doing.

They got very excited about it and City Falls Church has kind of taken some of our stuff and they've independently deployed on their signal system a couple of the different systems that we tested.

Yes, a little two-parter.

One, can we get like a tour and just go up and kind of get an idea of maybe like

on the ground location, just to see how they work, big cameras, all that kind of stuff.

So that's a good question.

So I guess to answer your first question, when everything goes up, certainly as we're doing, like if county, county staff or city staff are interested, want to be out there during the install to look at it, we can certainly help you out with that.

There's also kind of essentially dashboards, I don't have dashboards available for this,

I know that the VDOT folks will have access to that.

I'm not sure if that permission would extend to city or county staff, but we can sort of talk to the vendor and see if we can get you view only access to look at that.

The purpose of this study isn't necessarily to make recommendations at that intersection itself.

We're still kind of a technology evaluation perspective.

Is the system working as intended?

What are the capabilities?

What can we do?

So I think we're going to be silent on what could or should be done at these intersections.

It's more, is the system working?

Now, that being said, if all the results will be documented in the report, that'll be available.

If people want to use that to make improvement recommendations, you know, I think that's out there, but I don't think that's in scope here.

And Culpeper District is going to be very involved with all this.

So they're going to see the data as it comes in.

And obviously if there's any

Anything that's concerning to them, I'm sure Culpeper District will be jumping on that as things go along.

So they're going to be, you know, we have regular meetings with the district staff where they're going to know what's happening and we'll give them data.

So, but, but yeah, I think that's, but it's not, this is not a intersection improvement project.

I think it'd be really valuable to this group and the policy board at the conclusion of this to hear from you all again,

Hear about your assessment of the technology and its validity and its accuracy, but also the actual data of outcomes.

Those intersections are of importance to everybody in this room.

Yeah, I'm sure it would be.

We've got a couple, but I'm not sure I want to throw them out there until we've had a chance to evaluate them as well.

But it's a few more locations.

One of the things that we definitely want to make sure there's some amount of pet activity at the locations that we've got.

And so there's some in the 29 Stonefield area that have been discussed as possible options.

So that's a great question.

That's part of the reason why we picked it is because you have that car wash there with the funny driveway geometry.

And then you've got the behavior happening where the bridge narrows.

And the goal really would be to try and get far enough down that approach that we could see.

I mean, we obviously can't get past the bridge structure, but to start to look at whether we're getting conflicts there in that under bridge area.

So that would be the goal of that.

No other questions?

All right.

Thank you very much.

So,

I'm going to start with the SS4A update.

We're currently working on two big tasks.

One is the City of Charlottesville safety demonstration project.

We're going to be doing an implementation project at the East High Street, Mead Avenue, and Stewart Street intersections.

So we're preparing a public meeting on February 25th.

It's going to be at 5.30 PM at the Burnley Moran Elementary School.

We have presented three implementation options for public feedback to see which implementation project residents believe to have the greatest safety impact on those intersections.

The other thing we're working on is the starting of the development, the comprehensive safety action plan.

We'll be meeting with each of the jurisdictions in one meeting to discuss the existing conditions report, but also discuss safety criteria to make sure that the draft safety action plan will align with each of the jurisdictions needs.

Those meetings are scheduled starting this week and next week.

That's all I have on the SS4A.

The next NPO tech meeting is going to be on April 15th at Pan Am.

Any questions on staff updates?

Is the RTP meeting still scheduled?

Sorry?

All right, no other questions?

Then we can move on to the VDOT project update.

Hold on.

You don't hear me?

Hello, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Can you hear me?

Can you see my screen?

All right, I'm going to talk about the recommendations.

Yes, I am.

Can you guys hear me?

Can you hear me now?

Okay.

Yeah, I'm just going to give you an update of the SMART SCALE.

recommendations that were presented at the CTB meeting last month, and then I'll give you a little update on the studies that we've got starting and getting ready to start.

So, okay, the first thing is we had a reduction in funding that was presented at the same meeting by Laura Farmer from the

Financial Planning Office, and VDOT.

And basically what it shows is they're taking 1.6 million dollars and moving it from construction to maintenance.

So this is going to reduce the amount of money that we have for SMART SCALE.

And this is just

proposed for this year's budget.

If we have a lot of snow like they're forecasting this week, it could further reduce this amount of money.

We don't know yet until that gets done, but this is what they presented in January.

So basically this is what we've gotten for the previous rounds of SMART SCALE 1 through 6 and you can see it's been started out at like 54 and then went up to like 215.

The 212 and 215 are where or 112 and 115 are where we got the infusion of the omnis bill tax fuel tax money so those jumped up and they fades it in over two rounds so

That's been phased in and now we're back to what we would normally be getting per round with the additional gas tax money.

57, but it's actually more than that.

That's how much we've funded out of that pot of money that we got.

But this is how it's fluctuated over time.

The high priority funding is that's not guaranteed.

It could be zero.

Fortunately, we've gotten funding out of the high priority pot of money every round.

So this round of SMART SCALE, as you can see comparing all the districts, we got a total of $68 million, and they reduced it by $6.6 million to cover additional funding for Fontaine Streetscape Project, the Fontaine Interchange, and there's a laundry list of projects, but those are two of the ones.

District Avenue might have gotten some money, but there's a list of like seven projects across the district that had to get extra funding to meet their revised budgets.

So that's why we had a reduction in this round.

At the bottom are the four projects that we got funded.

Two of them were in the Culpeper District, one of them was in the town, one of them was in the county, but they're basically on the two ends of one road.

the Peter Jefferson Parkway project down on 250 in Pantops and then the other one is up in Warrenton.

Basically most of the other projects on the list, well all the other projects on the list weren't recommended

Basically, for the most part, it was cost.

There's just not enough cost for the benefit, or too much cost for the benefit of what we're getting out of the project, and that's going to be consistent.

Main reason is there's just not enough money.

$68 million doesn't go very far.

A couple of the things that across the state, we had 53 projects that were recommended out of 270 submissions.

We had four out of 24.

So that's basically the pot of money of pot of pool of projects that we're looking at.

The land use changes over last round,

We did see a reduction in the scores, but it was across the board for all projects.

Everybody got a benefit though.

So if you had points in other factor areas, which we did, that just multiplied, increased those points by a certain number based on your landing score.

Economic Development, again, slight reduction in those scores.

We don't get a lot about it, points out of Economic Development, so it was slightly less because of the way it's calculated using the Virginia scan versus having to put in all of the land use activities that were going on, or Economic Development activities that were going on in your region.

There's three parts to that make up economic development so you still get points out of those other areas even if you don't get any points out of the economic development portion of that score.

HPP didn't really affect us this round because the 250 project would have been funded in step two because it was scored high enough that it was we had other projects below it that got funded also so but who knows how it's gonna play out in the future.

Eligibility it had a

major effect on everybody because and what you can see here the number of eligible

Applications dropped by 55% as well, and the average cost of those projects went up by 53%.

So it basically did what they were wanting it to do.

It just makes it kind of in the future moving forward, it's going to be harder to come up with eligible projects, at least from our district, to submit applications.

Here's the list of projects and how they ranked and scored.

The yellow and blue project at the top are the ones that were recommended for funding, and the ones in the green lower are the ones in the MPO and Albemarle County area.

You can see where the statewide mean is for all the projects across the state, and our district median was much higher than that one.

So that's just how they

fell out this time, quite a few in the MPO in Albemarle County that were below the statewide mean.

And those were the higher cost projects, the interchange projects at Barracks and Fifth Street, as well as the double roundabout at Rio Road and Hillsdale.

And a wrong one, let's see.

Lastly, here's the score.

A couple of takeaways of this.

We scored better overall.

As you can see, 18 of our projects in the district scored in the top 50%, and all of our projects won in the top 65%.

That's great.

That's better than any other district did for this round.

So I'm really happy with how things played out, even though we only got four projects funded.

What's going to happen next?

Right now they're going through the consensus between the CTB members and the districts to see which projects they want to recommend, they want to move forward with in the six-year plan.

We've already met with our Captain Byers, our CTB member, and he's on board with our current list of projects.

So that's what they're considering now, and then they'll have a public hearing on the six-year plan in April and May, and then they'll present the consensus scenario to the CTB in May, and then they'll adopt the final six-year plan, which will include all of the new projects that were recommended for funding at their June meeting.

And I think that's all I have.

Joe, do you know where we're going to get the full score cards that came out and not just the total love scores?

They're available.

Oh, they're out now?

Oh, cool.

I think it's under Resources.

It would be good to make a SMART SCALE page under Resources.

Thanks.

Regarding the studies, we just got a notice last week that the pipeline studies which were proposed to go to the CTB this month got pushed to next month, so we won't know what the outcome of that is.

approval processes.

We do have the two, three star studies that are just the one in the city at Ridge and McIntyre and Maine to West Main and all those that intersection is moving forward.

I think Sandy can give you an update on that one, but basically they are developing the survey template or survey initial survey for that one to go out to the public on

What do you guys think about this intersection?

What are your concerns?

And those kind of things.

So that'll be the preliminary survey.

And then we'll, once we get that data back, we'll start to meet and look at the guts of what's going on there and try to come up with some solutions.

But we'll keep you posted as we get more information.

But like I said, it's still preliminary right now.

The other study is the 29 corridor north.

It's two studies.

One of them's the interchange at 250 Bypass and Emma Street, and the other one is 29 North or hydraulic.

So we're gonna work those, try to work those together as much as possible, but it's basically to look at that whole corridor through Woodbrooke up in Albemarle County.

We're still finalizing the framework document for the study, which is basically your,

scope for the study and once we get that approved by TMPD and funded we'll be starting that study.

And like I said, the last two projects are the Interchange Project 118, and that's a pipeline study.

And we're going to look at what we can do to fix some of the growing issues there with that southbound left turn movement.

So that's what we're going to try to focus on.

And then the other one is the 5th Street.

We're going to relook at the 5th Street interchange as well as the corridor from Harris Road just north of 5th Street Station Parkway south through the interchange.

We're going to look at that based on the changes that the city made with the portion north, we're going to try to incorporate them into the portion that runs south.

But those will be approved at the March meeting by the CTB, and then we'll kick those studies off at that point.

I have one.

Chuck, we submitted comments for the framework documents a few weeks back.

They'll all have to be signed.

So you'll see the revisions.

Other revisions will be incorporated for the document that you all will be

Now because it involves an interchange, there's another step we've got to go through regarding the review of the assistant state L&D engineer to make sure we've captured everything that they want to see in the study.

So it's more of a technical piece than it is anything else, but I think we've captured everything that we got comments from you all on.

Well, that's all I have.

Well, thank you, Chuck.

I think we're good.

And that takes us to our roundtable updates.

I'll go first and try to be brief with the city of Charlottesville and then let Tommy fill in anything that I'm missing.

Last month, last month, it's been so long.

I rolled out the city's strategy around doing transportation planning to have safer streets.

I did that at the 20th, January 20th city council session, and then followed that up February 3rd council session to talk about what that means for bikes and safe routes to school and stuff like that.

Plenty of information if you'd like to go back and watch, but that's sort of going to be the guiding strategy for us over the next five years or so.

Tying together the work that we've already committed to and already have on the books and are currently working on to sort of a longer-range strategy of pulling together a city-wide transportation plan that pulls together all the modes and makes sure they play well together.

One of the projects that we're doing that's contributing to that is part of Move Safely Blue Ridge.

Gorjan spoke to it earlier.

We're doing a film project over on East High Street.

public engagement around that on February 25th at Verlinden Elementary showing off a few different design options for those intersections on East High Street and collecting public feedback.

We've also got a second project we're working on with VDOT with their bike head office on Fifth Street extended.

We are looking to do a road guide and install a two-way directional bikeway in that removed lane southbound on Fifth Street.

We're looking to do public outreach on that

End of March, we're mailing down the dates and location of that this afternoon.

Those are sort of the big ones coming up on this spring.

Tommy's got a fun program that he's working on right now.

And so I'm going to pass it over to him and hopefully he's still in his office and we're confronted with silence.

I might have to pick up the ball and explain what he's working on right now.

Tommy.

Yup, he's probably talking to somebody about this program right now.

So right now, Tommy is handing out e-bike vouchers.

We, through the month of January, collected folks who were interested in his names and did a lottery on February 5th and started notifying people that they now have the ability to pick up a thousand dollar voucher to buy an e-bike at one of our local bike shops.

It's a physical piece of paper.

It has a number on it.

It looks like a golden ticket, kind of.

So Tommy has to be in the office to meet people so that they can come pick up their golden ticket.

And it's really brought a whole different energy to the front desk of Neighborhood Development Services.

You can leave people looking at it and saying like, oh, I've got to do another permit application, or I've got to get my site plan reviewed.

And it's usually not the most ecstatic interaction that you deal with in city hall, but we've had a lot of very exciting, friendly

faces who were just thrilled to go out and get a new bike that's going to help them with their commute or exercise or whatever.

So that's his big program right now.

We're also starting to gear up for Bike Month, which will be in May.

So more to come after share.

and Sara Pennington.

So we are finally kicking off our Kinesh Trail Shady's Bath Master Plan.

So I've reached out to several people in this room to be part of the technical committee.

You should be seeing an invite for our kickoff meeting for that technical committee in the next week or so.

The meeting is in March, but you'll see the invite in the next week or so.

And there will be sort of like a broader public kickoff event

PEC's Active Mobility Summit, and our consultants will be there to help gather information from people who are already very engaged in biking and walking in our community to hear more about what they think about this project.

But there will be an even broader public engagement process trying to capture the thoughts and feelings of people who are not currently biking and walking in our community.

So that is finally kicking off.

It's going to run for about two years.

AC44 stuff.

I mean, we're starting to write the transportation chapter for AC44.

They've had to, it might have to delay tomorrow again, but they've been going to the board to present the chapter and the draft so far, but we'll have to go cancel it because of the snow.

They should probably come look at the snow.

You do.

And then otherwise this is more rural, but if you're driving around and you see systemic notice signs in the rural areas, there's no action development happening.

This is just us trying to advertise better the rural rusting paving program to residents on those roads.

I have received a million phone calls.

It is very fun.

I think that's

So, in regards to that program, I know there's been a lot of questions about what gets mailed to the residents for the data programs, and one of the things that, from VDOT, my understanding is that if it's not posted and a gravel road is paved, you're automatically increasing the speed on that dramatically.

Is that explicitly now in that so that citizens know that unless it's otherwise posted,

I mean, it seems to me that that's something that really should be in there that citizens know, because there's a lot of buyer's remorse that you see around Albemarle County, where people post them to run large signs saying, please slow down, afterwards it will pay.

They're not aware of the impact that it's really going to have on their neighborhood, unless those roads get paved.

And I know in advance, I mean, VDOT says right up there that it will increase the speed limit.

I don't know about this year, just letters that were sent out last week, but that's really a suggestion to have.

and Lonnie, I'm sorry, this is your first meeting.

This is my first.

Well, we've had our, you know, we had a meeting that was, there was no doubt to, I don't know that I have anything.

Thanks for joining us.

I'll remind me.

We were supposed to have this already, but it got sent out as well.

But we have a parks and rec master plan coming up for public hearing.

March's Planning Commission meeting includes an extensive plan for a paved shared use path trail network.

More to come on that.

All right.

We have submitted our FY26 operating grant to DRPT.

That deadline is always the first of February every year.

So we were able to complete that and get that grant.

And we'll wait to hear for the six year plan as to if there are any changes to that.

And then of course, approval from CTB in the summer.

We are also finishing up the CAP strategic plan and that will go to the commission for potential adoption at their March meeting.

And then kicking off all the fun spring events.

As the weather gets warmer, it seems like there's always more to do, particularly with Bike Month.

Bella has been working on the Bike Month Business Challenge for its second year.

So we're hoping to have some exciting new additions to that.

Thank you.

The only thing I'll add is that we are having an internal VDOT SmartScale debrief meeting next week with everybody across the state, all the different disciplines.

So if there's anything coming out of that, that's probably where we'll start talking about potential changes that are going to be considered for Round 7.

Do you anticipate changes to the methodology for job seven?

I don't know if Chuck's following the call, but he may or may not be able to speak to this.

But I think

There were a lot of changes that occurred this round.

And so I think there's going to be a lot of analysis on what the impact of those changes are.

What I will say is I think the survey is closed, but hopefully those of you who are contacted for the survey provided feedback through the SMART SCALE survey, because that's certainly going to be taken into account.

And I know that our VDOT staff has provided feedback as well.

And the goal of the survey is to really

for them to hear what we were seeing and experiencing, and we'll go from there.

Sorry, that, how's that for a very long day?

It's kind of what I expected.

Like, I would be curious to, I mean, we're following the CTB meetings, obviously, curious to, in their analysis, did it have the intended events?

And were there any unanticipated outcomes

That happened by changing the methodology.

Like we're very curious because we know in some areas, for example, they didn't have access to the HPP fund.

You know, there's a lot of impacts to these changes.

And so there's always, you know, there's a part of us that's like, well, let's stick with the same methodology for several years so we can look at the trends and the changes.

But then there's also if something wasn't, if there was an unintended consequence, let's go ahead and fix it right away.

So we're really curious to see what will happen.

I know there are some,

And I think another thought that's in my mind is how did regions with a transportation authority fare comparatively since they had a lot more funding to leverage?

And so just really paying attention to some of these

I can give you a very quick breakdown on leverage funding if you're interested in hearing that.

So basically, there were a total of 10 projects in the district grant program and six projects in the high priority program that were funded that also had leverage funding.

That's not how many projects overall.

And then just as a comparison for the high priority program, well there were 53 projects that were recommended for approval throughout the state, statewide, so that's also a very low number.

Similar to what Christine was pointing out about the unintended consequences, I'd be curious to understand if the changes also had the intended consequences and to what degree, particularly because we didn't agree with the intent to begin with.

I'd also be curious, like, how does the political calendar impact how that is going to change since it seems like some of those decisions sometimes were potentially politically driven and we are in the middle of an election year in Virginia.

Sure, and the policies are sort of implemented at the direction of the Secretary, too.

If there's an administrative change, there could be different priorities that result in some changes that are similar to that administration.

I do want to caveat what I said.

That's just the leverage funding was just within that construction district.

It doesn't necessarily indicate whether or not there was funding from those authorities that looked at that.

Can I ask one more question for you to come back to us with at some point?

I'm curious how the results of SMART SCALE are going to impact further up the chain, like the pipeline process and STARS, given that Amar County and AMPO on our behalf submitted a bunch of projects that went through the pipeline process and then were so expensive that they weren't funded.

Will we potentially see changes to the pipeline process so that we have more competitive projects flowing out of that process, or is it a wait and see approach?

I don't, so I will say that the locations, there's a lot of information about the locations in terms of the program guidelines for what's eligible to be studied.

I don't know that there's a lot, the same level of guidance for

What the recommended improvements should be.

So I think some of it is everybody bringing their own perspective.

Like all the stakeholders bring their own perspective and their own priorities to the table when agreeing on what the recommendations should be.

So I think there's more flexibility on that end by doing this discussion.

Any other questions for Steven?

All right.

Yeah, I'll try and keep it brief here.

Just a quick overview, some 5303 updates, fiscal year 24, please get any remaining claims, reimbursements in within the next 30 days or so, so closeout can happen.

fiscal year 26 funding opportunity is open in web grants and that will remain open until May 1st for that application deadline and you guys are well on your way to getting that going our Virginia Breeze service set a ridership record for 2024 with a 9.2% increase over 2023 so that's great news for us and everyone in the Commonwealth

Our grant application, and this was mentioned previously, our grant application cycle is closed and we're beginning scoring and if any will be in contact with any applicants, they'll be on the lookout for that with any clarifications or updates here in the coming weeks if you haven't received them already from your program administrator.

CAP reminder, Commuter Assistance, continue to work with your strategic plans and development of applications and program operations.

And some other good news, NCDOT launched a new intercity bus service that is connecting to the Danville area and that is connecting to Winston-Salem via Greensboro and Reedsville.

So even more intercity bus connections now available on the Virginia Breeze.

and I believe that, oh, and hot off the presses, we're working to develop some projections for 5303 funding for our MPOs to use in their UPWP's.

So be on the lookout for that communication in the coming weeks.

Questions for DRPT?

I do.

Mitch, hey, this is Jason from Jaunt.

I was just curious, of the Virginia Breeze routes, was there any standout performer

Well, actually, and I haven't added this to the update because it's still kind of new, and we'll also be sending a communication on this, but we've developed a dashboard and you can look at it.

It's currently up on our website.

I can look for the link and drop it in the chat and that can be shared with everyone.

But you can really look at per line, per stop, you know, which ones are performing well year over year and all that stuff.

So I will encourage you guys to play around with that tool developed by our very own Grace Stankus, dashboard extraordinaire.

Thank you.

We're currently working to refine stop locations.

So I'm actually working on that with that program manager, Avery.

And so there's a lot to do, you know, trying to get the system, you know, the next line launched.

and we're working as best we can to under the crunch.

But right now we're just finalizing stop locations and getting all those agreements in place before we can kind of issue an RFP to solicit potential service providers on that.

All right.

Any other DRPT questions?

Seeing none.

I don't believe we have anybody from FHWA or FTA online.

So no one from CAT, but I will note that we are in the end of the process of hiring a transit planner for CAT.

Those of you who are on the RTP or the Jaunt board know this, but we had, for January, we had a board retreat specifically geared around identifying priorities.

initiatives that Johnson focuses time and energy on.

Mike Murphy reported on this.

And in particular, they're having another extended board session this March.

But what came out of the January 3rd meeting was a top five where implementing new software for scheduling.

We are woefully 20, 25-plus years of technology behind on that.

So it's long overdue.

Implementing microtransit pilots, maybe for ADA Green,

Working with CAT to formalize our ADA agreement with them.

Evidently, it hasn't been updated in the last 10 years or something like that.

So that's a priority, creating a performance evaluation for staff, including our CEO, and then made it an active presence in CARTA.

We also submitted a number of grants to DRPT on February 1st.

which include things like software and the microtransit demos.

And this coming this April, May, we're probably going to do extended ridership survey.

So certainly seek some of the URL's help on that, getting the word out.

And that's about it.

Any questions on Joan?

Our last one is UVA.

Do you have dates from UVA, William?

Not really, yeah.

Awesome.

Any other updates?

All right, cool.

Matters from the public?

No matters?