A major goal of Town Crier Productions is to help people better understand how the infrastructure around them came to be, a task more difficult in an era when there are very few ways to learn how the overall system works.
For instance, Charlottesville’s government took over responsibility for planning and procurement of road projects within city limits from the Virginia Department of Transportation back in 2005.
While that has included completion of the John Warner Parkway, the Belmont Bridge, and several other projects, the city has recently struggled to deliver projects on time and has been working with VDOT to move out of “deficient” status.
Charlottesville’s current planning documents all point the way toward a more dense city while also removing space available for vehicles. Goal 2 of the transportation chapter of the Comprehensive Plan is to “improve quality of life and promote active living by reducing automobile use and congestion and supporting multimodal options for safe and convenient travel.”
Charlottesville City Council gets transportation update in chambers from Chambers
How well is Charlottesville meeting these various planning goals? And how well does the city communicate what it plans to do to the people who live here and the people who commute here? For instance, the city’s website listing Transportation and Mobility projects has not been updated since November 2025.
One way to get information is to check in directly with the people charged with doing the work, preferably when they’re in a position where elected officials can ask questions and communicate their priorities. One such check-in took place on July 15, 2026, when Charlottesville’s Transportation Planning Manager briefed Council in a work session that lasted an hour and a half. (view the presentation)
Ben Chambers began with highlights from the past fiscal year including a submission of a project through VDOT’s Smart Scale process. Charlottesville had been asked to stop making applications due to a backlog of uncompleted projects.
“This will be West Main and Ridge that was brought to you for your endorsement a few weeks back,” Chambers said. “We’ve got all of our application materials in. At this point, it’s just a matter of hitting the go button.”
The project, which is not listed on the city’s Transportation and Mobility website, would restrict eastbound traffic from West Main Street onto Water Street in favor of additional space for cyclists and pedestrians. Motorized vehicles would instead travel onto South Street and have to make a left turn to get to downtown. More details in a story I wrote for C-Ville Weekly back in January.
Chambers also had an update on a plan to put the four-lane stretch of 5th Street on a road diet by converting one lane for bicycles and pedestrians. There will be a test next year.
“This is a project that Public Works will be doing some testing of the traffic modeling next year,” Chambers said. “Our traffic modeling didn’t take into account that we have a lot of construction projects that are going to affect this corridor. So we want to make sure before we put it down anything permanent that we understand the traffic implications that are happening there.”
The city does have a website for the 5th Street SW Road Diet and Bikeway project but it does not appear to be up to date.
Chambers is also part of an effort to use the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority to increase funds to facilitate frequency and route expansion. Council will get a longer briefing in September.
Chambers had another transit update.
“We have audited every bus stop in the CAT system in the past year,” Chambers said. “This is a huge accomplishment. We for a long time didn’t know where all of our bus stops were. And the ones that we did know, we didn’t know what was actually at them beyond, you know, just a typical CAT sign.”
The city also hands out vouchers for people to buy E-Bikes. Chambers said some of that funding comes from penalties paid to the city through the dockless mobility permit program.
“We have moved beyond the initial program which was $1,000 vouchers for every winner,” Chambers said. “Now we have a peer program that has higher vouchers for folks who have low income needs and may need assistance to pay for a whole bike.”
Chambers’ presentation also hinted at regional cooperation with Albemarle County to make alterations to roadways in and around where Emmet Street meets a major highway and then becomes one itself.
“We have identified a few alternatives around the Hydraulic/250 and 29/250 interchanges to remove some of the unnecessary movements that are there, improve some safety and make some connections through that area that aren’t there today, including an extension of Hillsdale Drive south to the bypass that would sort of provide a connection to the new Holiday Drive site for transit, pedestrians and bicyclists as well,” Chambers said.
The City of Charlottesville purchased the 2000 Holiday Drive site for $6.2 million for a future low-barrier shelter. Here’s the latest I have on that story.
The slide deck for the presentation offered no further details or context for how those changes would be made. Have decisions already been decided before the public knows there is a decision point?
Chambers said the public can expect to be engaged soon.
Lowering speed limits through design with Rose Hill an initial example
The Comprehensive Plan has several references to lowering speed across the city and that has been an item on Chambers’ to-do list. Last year City Council agreed to spend $500,000 on a series of low-cost “quick-build solutions” to try to encourage people to slow down.
Chambers said a study of city roads found that most of them have posted speed limits that are higher than the speed they are designed for.
“That means all of our local streets, we said they should be 20 miles per hour,” Chambers said. “They’re all 25 today, so they’re showing up as orange on here. A lot of that has been baked into our city codes.”
Chambers said he is working with the City Attorney’s office on language that will allow the city engineer to determine the speed limit based on a series of factors. But in some cases that will mean adding additional infrastructure. It will also mean communicating to outsiders that they must follow Charlottesville’s rules.
“If we are going to be a town that has a lot of streets that are 20 miles per hour, that makes us pretty unique,” Chambers said. “And we need to make sure that people understand when they’re coming into the city. We’re going to be driving a little bit slower here.”
One of the first places this will take place is Rose Hill Drive which will see a design speed reduced to 25 miles per hour to improve safety for bikes and pedestrians. A plan is underway for implementation next summer when the road is expected to be repaved.
“We were also trying to generally work with low cost, quick build materials, preserving the number of vehicle travel lanes and on street parking,” said Zoë Macomber, a senior transportation planner in Charlottesville. “We didn’t want to mess with that too much.”
In some areas, lane widths will be reduced from 17 feet to 11 feet and in others center turn lanes will be removed. There will also be a new four-way stop at Henry Avenue and Rose Hill in order to calm traffic down.
The project has been developed with feedback from the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association and the Charlottesville Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. City Council got a first look at the design but were not told a price tag.
For more information on the Rose Hill project, visit Connect Charlottesville.
Staff: Transportation mobility study not being done for the purposes of settling lawsuit
It’s not often I become a character in stories, but I hope my appearance is brief.
In January 2024, a group of Charlottesville property owners filed suit against the City of Charlottesville claiming that the city did not follow state law when it adopted the Development Code a month before.
“Despite advocating for [an] enormous increase in density, City Council failed to conduct any studies about the impact of the [New Zoning Ordinance] on the city’s transportation, schools, water, sewer, public services or infrastructure,” reads the third paragraph in the original complaint in what would become known as White v. Charlottesville.
Last summer, the zoning code was briefly in limbo because an outside counsel working for the city had failed to file a response on time. Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Claude Worrell later reconsidered his motion of default judgment.
Two months later, the plaintiffs agreed to settle the case if the city produced a traffic impact statement that followed state regulations and submit the New Zoning Ordinance to VDOT. Details are in the draft settlement agreement provided as part of the October 20, 2025 City Council meeting.
The staff report for that meeting said it would cost money to complete the traffic impact statement.
“Funds will be required to complete the necessary traffic studies for submission to VDOT, and these costs are expected to be meaningful,” reads the staff report for the settlement. “However, they are anticipated to be substantially lower than the costs the City would incur if the case proceeded through discovery, trial, and potential appeals, which would likely require extensive expert involvement.”
On the same night Council agreed to spend $6.2 million for 2000 Holiday Drive, they also agreed to set aside $1.5 million for “City Environmental and Mobility Plans.”
This staff report does not specifically tie the mobility plan to the traffic information statement. It is unclear if that work has been conducted but a nonsuit has been filed to end the existing legal case.
On July 15, 2026, Chambers mentioned my name when introducing a discussion of the mobility study which he described as making sure selected projects conform to city values.
“We also want to make sure that there is a longer term vision and strategy around implementing these projects, making sure that the implementation is connected to the vision that we have,” Chambers said. “I do want to note for anybody who is reading Sean Tubbs that the purpose of the city mobility plan is not responding to the infrastructure study request requirement from our lawsuit. That is something we’ve already taken care of.”
What my previous reporting might have failed to note is that on October 20, 2025, City Council agreed to direct $650,000 from the surplus fund to hire 3TP Ventures to specifically work on the traffic impact statement though that phrase is not used in the staff report.
“This project will consider and assess both the impacts of Charlottesville Development Code together with projected population growth and this project is inclusive of the transportation study necessary to meet the terms of the settlement agreement relative to the White v. Charlottesville case,” reads the staff report.
If this work has been conducted, it has not been done in public and City Council was not given a status update at the July 15, 2026 work session.
In an email, Chambers said any follow up on the traffic impact statement will need to be directed to the City Manager’s office. A Freedom of Information Act request will be submitted by Monday morning.
Chambers said the mobility study will take a look at all of the transportation strategies in the Comprehensive Plan and the first product will be an Existing Conditions and Plans Assessment memorandum.
“That really lays out these are the things that we need out of a mobility plan and why,” Chambers said.
Chambers said the Development Code has a lot of policy changes such as no longer requiring off-street parking and requiring more spaces for bikes to be parked. That means a lot of room for future study especially on parking.
“We really don’t have very robust plans for parking,” Chambers said. “We did have a plan back in 2016 that laid out sort of parking needs around downtown. Since then, not a whole lot has been moved forward with that. So we need to sort of understand the supply and the demand of parking in the city.”
Chambers said a component of the mobility plan will also include trying to encourage commuters to take other modes of transportation because the city cannot solve traffic issues by building more capacity.
“A lot of the issues that we’re facing around congestion are not something that we can build our way out of and it’s not something that we can really affect all that much because it’s because of regional growth, it’s because of people coming in and needing to use our facilities,” Chambers said.
Albemarle County is also producing a mobility study and Chambers said the city is working to help ensure language is consistent across both efforts. A new advisory committee will oversee the city’s work.
Before you go: The goal of Town Crier Productions is to increase awareness about what is happening at the local, regional, state, and federal government levels. Please share the work with others if you want people to know things. Paid subscribers cover the cost of conducting research for this article which was originally published in the July 28, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. You can either subscribe through Substack or make a charitable contribution.
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