Albemarle PC to kick off public portion of county’s multimodal transportation plan

The work of staff in Albemarle’s Community Development Department planners is guided by projections from the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia that the county’s population will grow to 152,770 by 2050.

A new Comprehensive Plan adopted in October 2025 offers the latest version of an intention to prepare for more people to live, work, shop, recreate, and be educated in public schools. The focus will now be more on targeted “activity centers” rather than a general implementation of projects in the various master plans.

Albemarle Supervisors were briefed on the “multimodal transportation plan” in April and in June were shown the new transportation priority list that county staff will use to make decisions about what projects become candidates for funding. That transportation list is still not available on the county’s website but you can view all of the materials here for the June 3, 2026 work session here:

• Transportation Project Prioritization Report
• Map of all of the projects
• Albemarle County Transportation Project List by Project ID
• Scoring methodology
• Map of the priority projects
• Draft list with project scores and ranks, grouped by project stage
• Presentation given to Supervisors on June 3, 2026

On Tuesday, the Albemarle Planning Commission will see a more detailed description of how the plan will be developed in order to “provide a holistic understanding and vision of the future transportation system in Albemarle County.” The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in Lane Auditorium. (meeting info)

Resources:

• Staff report on the Multimodal Transportation Plan
• Attachment 1: Multimodal Transportation Plan Scoping Document
• Attachment 2: Presentation to the Albemarle Planning Commission

The beginning of the staff report notes that progress will be constrained by a limited amount of funding.

“The acknowledgment of limited resources will be a guiding principle throughout the development of the [Multimodal Transportation Plan],” reads the staff report. “The [Multimodal MMTP will likely recommend strategically focusing and phasing investments for each travel mode network to deliver functional portions of these planned transportation networks.”

The materials provided to the Planning Commission draw from a multimodal map for the city of Norfolk, a city with a 2025 population estimate of 240,183.

According to the memo, the plan will derive from the language of the 2025 Comprehensive Plan as well as the Long-Range Transportation Plan adopted by the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Metropolitan Planning Organization on May 21, 2024. (read that document)

Staff identified five key themes and will ask themselves five questions to guide the work.

1. Connected: Does a network of connected facilities exist?
2. Accessible: Does the network go where I need it to go? Does it provide access to the places I need to get to?
3. Safe: Can I get where I need to go without risk of bodily harm?
4. Efficient: Does the transportation network move people and goods with minimal waste?
5. Equitable: Does one group of people experience disproportionate levels of service or access compared to another?

How would you answer?

In any case, the plan will not prioritize new roads.

“Much of the effort will focus on new connections to critical locations for pedestrians and bicyclists, and preparing for future transit service,” the staff report continues. “These are the improvements most needed, reflecting many transportation-related public comments from [the 2025 Albemarle County Comprehensive Plan] and the 2050 CA-MPO LRTP.”

The staff report also argues that traffic congestion cannot be solved by widening roads and states that some traffic congestion is inevitable.

“Since some congestion always accompanies a thriving economy, the plan reframes the question to how can the system accommodate future economic activity and population growth?” staff asks in their report.

The county will not be seeking new comments from the public as the work of the Multimodal Transportation Plan gets underway. Instead, previous comments made during the creation of the Long-Range Transportation Plan and the 2025 Comprehensive Plan will be re-used. New input will be taken later but the “community engagement” plan has not been developed yet.

Around 2,700 people participated in the creation of the 2025 Comprehensive Plan according to materials in the presentation. It is unclear how many people took part of in the long-range transportation plan but Appendix F of the document lists many direct quotes of public input. Go look!

“Stonefield and everything around hydraulic is unsafe,” reads one comment at an event held on July 26, 2023 at the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s Sixth Street community.

“Centralized sidewalks in downtown Crozet to connect businesses, park, and schools – want families with children to be able to walk safely to school and park on built out sidewalk systems,” reads a comment made at an August 9, 2023 event with the Crozet Community Advisory Committee.

Finally for this segment, a comment taken at the Downtown Transit Center on July 25, 2023.

“Shopping centers on N29 hard to get to from downtown. Ivy Rd orthopedic to Barracks Rd hard to access. Public safety concern when walking downtown. Buses are dirty now that they’re free. Hard to get to work on Ivy Rd. Have to get uber to work, but bus back is not efficient. Would like efficient, clean trip on bus both ways.”

An editorial note:

This newsletter will not use the acronym MMTP and will spell out the words each time. Acronyms are jargon and serve as a barrier to people understanding the concept of planning. For instance, the staff report refers to CA-MPO Long-RTP. Do you know what that is?

The county’s preferred acronym for the 2025 Comprehensive Plan will also never be used in this newsletter unless as part of a direct quote. Important documents should be referred to by name and not shorthand.

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Paid subscribers cover the cost of conducting research for this article which was originally published in the October 12, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement.  You can either subscribe through Substack or make a charitable contribution.