Local planning body to open public comment period for long range transportation plan

The Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization Policy Board will meet at 4 p.m. in person at 407 Water Street in Charlottesville. That’s the headquarters of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.(meeting info)

A lot of strings come with federal funding for transportation projects. For starters, all urban areas above a certain population must have a body in place to provide a local check on the future of transportation projects. Locally, the MPO Policy Board prevented the development of the Western Bypass by refusing to allow any money to go toward construction. In the summer of 2011, that changed and one day I really hope to get to write a book about the whole story.

However, MPO meetings tend to be very bureaucratic and are laden with jargon. But, decisions made here determine what transportation projects eventually get built. I write Charlottesville Community Engagement to reduce the barrier to entry by making an attempt at explaining some of the details. 

Start with the minutes of the March 26, 2024 meeting. One of the items was a discussion of applications for funding that go through the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Smart Scale process which runs every two years. Final applications for this round are due on August 1. One project is to make changes to the Barracks Road corridor in Albemarle between Georgetown Road and the U.S. 250 bypass. Another is a proposal to convert the Exit 120 interchange at I-64 and Fifth Street Extended to a diverging diamond. A third project would see are improvements on U.S. 250 at Peter Jefferson Parkway and Rolkin Road. 

On April 1, a focus group met to review potential ways to address congestion on Old Ivy Road. More details will be made public soon. 

Here is where the bureaucracy gets a little thicker. Next the Policy Board will consider the “unified work program” that tells TJPDC transportation planners what to work on. A lot of the work is coordinating projects across multiple levels of government. For instance, one of the projects at the moment is the creation of the Move Safely Blue Ridge program that is a precursor to one pool of federal funds. 

Indulge me a comparison.

Read one way, J.R.R. Tolkein’s fantasy novels have a lot of bureaucracy and jargon, too. One of the key pieces of planning in our real world is the Long Range Transportation Plan mandated by the federal government to give a snapshot of what the community wants built over the next 20 years or so. This is not set in stone and can be amended.

There has been no controversy related to the plan for many years, but this document was used for decades to block construction of the Western Bypass of U.S. 29 to avoid the commercial strip that began to proliferate in the 1980’s. 

In the here and now, the TJPDC is working on an update of the plan now and a draft was published on Thursday for public comment. The MPO will review the document at this meeting. 

But just imagine these words written in the font Peter Jackson used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy: 

“The Long-Range Transportation Plan is a fundamental document for our community,” reads the executive summary. “It states our region’s collective vision for the future of our transportation system, and it identifies projects that we anticipate our region will implement in the foreseeable future.”

After that there will be a few staff updates including an update to something called the Transportation Improvement Program. This is highly technical stuff, but so is balancing a checkbook when you think about it. 

This particular improvement relates to passenger rail service that comes through Charlottesville. This is related to a recent decision to use a pot of federal funding that comes through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program. This region has never used that source before, and the TIP is being updated to give more specifics. This is just a formatting change, according to the staff report. 

Bureautic and jargon-laden, yes. But the end result is additional funding to increase passenger rail. Others may see it as boring, but I think I made it through two pages of The Silmarillion. But this? This I can write about! This is a link to stories I have written about passenger rail in Virginia. This stuff is epic to me. 

There will also be a discussion of the various stakeholders around the table. I often get great stories from those conversations. 

Before you go: The time to write and research of this article is covered by paid subscribers to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In fact, this particular installment is from the April 22, 2024 Week Ahead edition of the newsletter.