CTB considers cancellation of second phase of Charlottesville’s Emmet Street project

In the early years of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Smart Scale program, the City of Charlottesville was quite good at receiving funding for a variety of projects. 

The Smart Scale system evaluates the merits of all submissions and ranks them based on a series of criteria of how the finished product will benefit an area. These include congestion relief, environmental effects, and economic development.

The first round was finalized in 2016 and the city received funding for the East High Streetscape, the Emmet Street Streetscape, and the Fontaine Avenue Streetscape. The next year the Barracks Road and Emmet Street improvements was awarded. Two other projects were awarded in the next cycle, and a third was funded when another project in VDOT’s Culpeper District was canceled.

So far, none of those have proceeded to construction.

Last year, the city has previously asked the Commonwealth Transportation Board to cancel both the West Main Streetscape as well as funding to reconfigure the intersection of Preston Avenue, 10th Street NW, and Grady Avenue. 

On Tuesday, the CTB considered another cancellation at a work session held in the Hampton Roads district. In the fourth round of Smart Scale, the city requested and received $20,465,490 for a project titled Emmet Street Multimodal Phase 2.

“The original scope of the project included bicycle and pedestrian accommodations along Emmet Street with a shared use path on the east side of Emmet Street and on-road bicycle facilities on both sides of the road,” said Kimberly Pryor with VDOT at the October 22 meeting of the CTB. 

The project scope was for “bicycle and pedestrian accommodations along Emmet Street between Arlington Boulevard and Barracks Road to include a shared use path on the east side of Emmet Street and on-road bicycle facilities along both sides of the road.” 

This month, the city formally requested cancellation because a first phase is still in the planning stages despite being in development since 2016. 

“The current estimate is severely underfunded due to inflation, unit costs, and higher than anticipated right of way costs,” reads a slide in the presentation for the CTB on Tuesday. “The City of Charlottesville reassessed its commitments to transportation improvements and wants to deliver underway projects within their portfolio before undertaking new starts.” 

Pryor said the city is will not be able to advertise the project for construction until 2026. An original requirement for Smart Scale was that projects had to be completed within six years.

“As you can tell from that lengthy schedule, they’ve encountered some significant issues with the development of that project,” Pryor said. 

Charlottesville has skipped the last two Smart Scale cycles because the relatively new administration of City Manager Sam Sanders realized the city did not have the capacity to manage projects. Sanders has pledged to improve the system by hiring more staff and the city’s website now lists the status update of various projects.

The original Emmet Streetscape is now in the land acquisition phase. This initiative “provides a shared use path, improved bus stops, landscaping, improved pedestrian crossings, and a tunnel under the railroad tracks between Ivy Road and Barracks Road.”

Since the project was funded, the University of Virginia has embarked on development of the Emmet / Ivy corridor where the School of Data Science has recently been completed and other projects such as the Karsh Institute of Development are under construction. 

UVA is also seeking to build new residential halls along this stretch of road just to the north of Lambeth Commons. Last June, Council officially accepted $5 million from UVA to cover some of the cost of this streetscape as well as one at Fontaine Avenue that will along other things help for additional traffic between a growing Fontaine Research Center and Maury Avenue. 

Before you go: This particular story is combined from two separate stories from the October 21 and the October 24 editions of Charlottesville Community Engagement. The current way Town Crier Productions works is that stories get published first through the newsletter which is published through Substack. Then I take the stories and add them here. Often times I’ll add things. Want to support this? There are many ways. Drop me a line to learn more!