Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   4/27/2023

Request that you are able to zoom and tell us where you are and your reason for zooming.

Thank you, Ann Mallek representing Albemarle County and I was stuck in a traffic jam in Richmond as I was worried it might happen and I'm about 20 miles out coming back to Charlottesville now on 16th Street.

Alright, so I will entertain a motion for Ann to be able to zoom.

I move that we allow Supervisor Mallek to zoom in from I-64.

Is there a second?

I second.

Welcome, and we're delighted you're here.

As unlikely a story as that might be because of traffic enrichment.

Just be careful if you're driving, okay?

With that,

Lucinda, you want to start at your end?

I'm Lucinda Shannon.

I work for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District.

I'm Steve Derecka, the Toronto Area Chancellor.

I'm Kendall Howell from UDA, Department of Transportation.

Charmane White, DeDorich, Alumna, Kelly.

Okay, we'll do Gretchen back to you.

Okay, and so we'll ignite the McKeel, Almora Kelly.

Becca Thompson, representative of Charlottesville area lights.

Hal Morgan, the John Gould representative.

And I'll move to the screen.

Juwhan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Okay, so he's not there quite yet.

Next item on our agenda is approval of the agenda, so I will entertain a motion to approve the agenda.

I move for approval of the agenda.

If not, I then obtain a motion to approve the meeting minutes for March the 23rd.

I move for approval of the draft meeting minutes for March the 23rd, 2020-23.

Thank you so much.

growing up in rural Virginia you don't see that but those transitions are happening and we're headed in the right direction we have some amazing expertise on this partnership and I just want to thank you for all the work that you've done in Scottsville and say you know by all means keep in touch and keep up the good work thank you it's been a pleasure working with you.

CAT 2022 review and looking ahead to 2023.

So before I do my presentation, I want to bring in Bethany.

Can you hear me all right?

So Bethany is with the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

A very informative call for her team on April the 7th.

So that's it.

But we're really looking forward to getting this up and running.

Is that all right?

With this new process, start to finish, assuming you got all your stuff lined up, how long would it take to get an approval for a location?

Was the question how long it would take to get approval for what exactly?

Say we take a location for a shelter and we have all the right stuff and we say a prayer to a couple of months,

It's just going to be a matter of, can you get the engineering worked out with DGS so that they give you the permit approval to install the shelter?

Well, start to finish all the different steps.

We've been working on it for three years.

So the process you had to go through, and it's commendable that you figured it out, is VDOT governed statutorily by this process, or is it more their own decision process to consider these things?

Like at a legislative level to try to make changes because right now there is a legislative requirement that these shelters need to meet and that's why they go through DGS and have this longer process.

So we've been founding for three years and I am eager in the next six months to start seeing some shelves of good records.

It's actually Michael's fault.

It's actually Michael's fault.

It's actually Michael's fault.

It's actually Michael's fault.

I know Garland probably has some other questions.

Yeah, we just want to go through the presentation, but I wanted to make sure that we highlight the group and make sure everybody knows that our efforts will be very true here, both in the next six months.

Thank you for figuring this out.

We're just as eager as you all are.

There are other localities that are just as blatant, so that's great, thank you.

So thanks so much.

Thank you.

All right, I think you have a presentation.

That will improve connectivity from downtown by the high school and also to Fifth Street and also the jail.

Absolutely.

Okay.

And if there's any questions, I can answer.

I don't know about the questions, but I know that many of the board members probably would love to have that presentation.

You already had the presentation.

I just hadn't seen it.

Yes.

This board is one of them.

I was thinking about the wrong board.

Brian.

The Act II, one is, excuse me, so the work you're doing now makes a ton of sense, how does it integrate into, does it ever do the enhanced, start with enhanced, yeah, network in the future, which I, you know, I guess would require some, I think in the morning, mud coming into the system to do that, but is this sort of a stepping stone into that?

But in the interim, we also need to be very mindful that we need as much ridership as we can make enhancements to our service to get as much ridership to continue to get that funding model up and running.

I guess the more riders you get, the more funding you get.

Let's make sure that we shore up our reliability, make small incremental changes that are necessary for us to get more ridership as we look forward to doing the larger plans.

Yes.

So the document actually will be coming to city council and we can actually make a presentation to the board of supervisors if you would like to also.

Yes, so there's a study that's actually going on, I don't know, Ben, you want to talk about that?

And I'm actually going to let Ben, if he will, talk about it.

What are the actual options that we have here?

And then we'll take those to external stakeholders and get their feedback.

So folks from the county, folks from advocacy groups.

If you're going hydrogen cell or something, then fueling infrastructure would be interesting.

Thank you very much.

Once that, so the phase one part of the study will be, like you just said.

So we have to go through this whole process of designing fuel, deciding how we're actually going to implement it.

Hopefully it gets, the preliminaries show that it is still, our request is there.

It still has to go through the CTB Commonwealth Transportation Board.

But hopefully we'll be able to, we're far enough along in the plan to show them that we have done the due diligence.

Yeah.

Try me on a question.

No, it's still the same.

and we're no closer to getting those moved out because they stay in the shop more than they are on the street.

But we'll work through that model too.

So whoever is awarded, whether it's partial or full, that marketing plan will be key to being able to answer your question of when we can turn on the marketing.

Did you have scope, I'm sure, at least?

Yes, absolutely.

Finalization on the Route 5 alignment as it passed by JPJ?

Yes, and I believe the consultant has a recommendation for that.

So it's best for us to follow up with you.

Now we're not going to do every single one of them because the consultant, remember this was two years ago, so consultants actually made some changes to a couple of routes where they were moving from in front of schools because that was a different focus but now that you know COVID hit and we needed to figure out how to get students to schools we're going to leave those in so there will be some modifications to the existing plan.

Can you remind us on the microtransit, isn't there a requirement for, that funding only lasts a couple of years or something and then the region has to come up with it?

So this is, the first year is from the grant, the second year is on the county, and then the county will make a decision after that.

So the two year, there's stable funding, predictable funding for two years.

There's the stable funding, well, there's grant funding for the one year, the second year is on the county, but there's a grant required that would be a two-year pipe.

Would you give us dollars to actually improve our systems?

We need to get out in front of city council, and then we can move forward.

I'm not sure we'll figure that out when we get the vendor.

We'll know better at time.

Our rate, then.

Okay, so as your official time people, unless anyone has any other questions for Garland about this, then I'm going to move us on to Ben Chambers, who is going to talk about the Charlottesville, Mike and Penn, an update on what he did.

And Mayor Snook and Councillor Pinkston probably heard some of this already, but there are a couple of minor updates involved.

I don't know if you know how to do this better than me.

Let's do that.

Okay.

Cool.

Thank you.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to respond.

The study area is a city only.

Yes.

And that was going to be my question, and I'll just kind of piggyback on that because you can answer at the same time.

So how are we going to mirror those together?

So I'll double check that.

But really the point was like, is connectivity, is there an input that might elevate, if that's the right word, a project that could potentially create a continuous corridor?

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll look at our analysis and see if that's the case.

So we need to do this together.

Trying to get a stable project that people try to work on over the next several years.

I think it's something that has been hobbled for many, many years and that, like, that they're thinking beyond the borders, of course, the planners are operating, so that how they learn from officials.

This is a great question.

That's music to my mind.

Yeah, I mean we shouldn't, our priorities should actually be sort of a work plan of what we're trying to do and if we're saying our priorities are beyond what that work plan is then we're not really communicating to our citizens what we're actually doing.

When you have pages of priorities you really don't have any priorities.

Exactly, yeah it was sort of working that like the way it was working before was sort of if a funding opportunity came up that said show us that this is a priority for the city we could turn to any plan that we wanted to and pick it off the shelf and say this one says that it's a priority we can go with this plan so we're not doing that anymore thankfully.

I hope that there's no one that's had their hand up.

We're reviewing our transportation improvement plan and we will be hopefully adopting it in May and so I wanted to take this opportunity to kind of give a really brief overview like TIP 101 so that you all can feel like if you want to engage with them and read it you can feel a little bit more educated and informed about what it is that you're looking at.

The transportation improvement program is a financial plan for the employment

I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

So are there any questions about it?

The projects that have gone in this, presumably there's a backlog of ones that we've been looking at, but you don't start from scratch every time, I guess.

Any other questions?

We really like your dress today, Sandy.

That's all good.

I really do appreciate your leadership, and it has been wonderful.

When you say that, I just looked it up, what am I?

That means the French Revolution is imminent.

We're going to ask everybody to get whatever you want, come back and send it, but we'll each offer it together.

That means everybody.

We have all been here.

and all the places we've seen.

We would need to talk about it a little bit longer with this environment.

Thank you.

that we've actually done a lot of traveling for the last three months.

What's your name?

which has been some of the greatest moments of my life.

It was going to happen, but it actually happened.

But nobody wants one of those guys.

What's the basis?

Thank you.

How come there's not an order that works?

Thank you.

We'll try to let the people who have done that stuff in their mouth start with the updates.

Let's see.

I just want to talk about it a little bit.

That'd be great.

I may not be joking up until right now, but I am really excited about our plans and what we have worked on and what it is that I need to present so that I know parents probably feel like we have done nothing all year, but I promise you we have been in the churches working very hard to try to do what we can to get our students to school and get them there safely and on time.

Yes, yes, yes.

We're looking at what we need to do to even purchase more for our sponsors.

That's in the works.

Great.

Ted, I see you finished your cake.

They have a great playing institute, you know, there is CERTCOM, so we're looking forward to working with them to help us define what our needs are in the rural parts of our service area.

UTS, Becca?

But with that, I'll ask Kendall to hopefully install a phone number to formulate what you will say about where we are with our battery electric buses.

Nothing fun, right?

We've got to check out the new bus stops.

We can all be on the same bus.

I can go into great detail.

If you want to hit me up outside of this forum, I can go into great detail.

Yes, we'll leave.

I think the closest one is probably Massey Road.

One more minute.

And so I just want to say thank you and thank you.

The key is would you get back in a bus with them?

I want to say that what they don't like is driving behind me.

We try to be nice about that, but that's very true.

There are many rural people who come in through all of those roads that you just mentioned to get to other places.

As much fun as in big signs, you know, that says don't put that in Georgetown because you can't go on under a truck, for example.

Thank you.

That's their technical term, by the way.

All right, CAT, so this will be in Charlottesville Schools Park.

So we have an argument in the street to hire a consultant to help us complete our TSP.

Four groups?

Kenyon Horne started the process and we were running as fast as we can to get the, it's going to help to get a number of studies that are already completed.

And also the way that they put their presentation together is they were clearly

and they were doing TSPs for so many others.

So, I think I have paperwork, but I'm pretty sure we should all come get them and give us that information.

Any questions for Garland?

And you see, if you'd come to join us, you could have had a piece of cake.

We'll have one.

He's really regretting that decision when we stop for the cake break.

and then also the VDOT public meeting around all of the published drafts that will be for the Culpeper District will be Tuesday, May 2nd, if you're interested in attending that.

Okay, that's it?

Yep, I think that's it.

I'm thinking we have, Sandy, you have an MPO update.

Actually, why don't we let Elizabeth go first, if that's okay.

So we'll be working on getting a partner and an agreement in place for that.

So, we'll hear a lot more about that I'm sure.

All right, any other questions?

One other really quick update, just because Sara was not able to be here, to apply for a technical assistance grant to a strategic plan for the RideShare program, and that is also, it was recommended for funding when we applied, it was a 50-50 state funding local match, so we're gonna have to put that local 35,000, I think it was, and they recently contacted us and said they also included in the draft, said that there was some federal funding that had not been used, and they would like to apply that to our match.

And you said, oh no.

That's right.

I liked it.

The time scrambled around and around again.

And that citizen advisory model is so, I mean, it has a new head to it.

It's great, yeah.

I can say one thing.

All right.

I was going to say, that's that there's a way you can call on your phone and block it.

We have our mutual friend from Richmond, and she kind of set us up.

I should warn you.

Anybody else doing in the bottom here?

We really already missed you.

And have a lovely night.