Proposed Conditions on Two Lane MCP

In the event that the MCP is not rejected outright by the new council, the following conditions are proposed to mitigate the negative effect of the road on the City.

1. Road design

• The road design must be incorporated into a master plan for McIntire Park, which among other goals, insures that the impact of the road is as inoffensive as possible, e.g., screening, low speed limit, tight curves which follow the lay of the land, etc.
• There must be a strong commitment never to expand the road to more than two lanes. The right of way shall be for no more than two lanes, and the park designated as parkland (not a "transportation corridor"), to ensure maximum public input, should the decision to widen the road ever be revisited.
• There must be a unified and complete design for the road, which includes the county portion and intersections, before any work is started on the City portion.
• Provide adequate water retention and treatment to protect Meadow Creek.
• No trucks or commercial traffic.
• The Parkway must remain limited access, with no possibility for new subdivision or commercial streets to feed into it.
• The road must not have primary road status. It may be necessary for Council to pass a resolution stating that we cannot support primary road status because it is incompatible with road design principles espoused by this and previous councils.

2. Intersections

• There must be no more than a 17 lane intersection, which allows for pedestrian and bicycle access to the park from McIntire Ave. (via underpass, overpass, walk light, etc).
• The Melborne Ave intersection must be no more than 12 lanes.
• VDOT and or the City must do a feasibility study for a tight interchange (per Will Rieley's design), for the 250 intersection, with pedestrian access.

3. Parkland replacement

• There must be a substantial addition of acreage North of the park, including all 135 acres of the undeveloped land between Melborne and Rio Road. This land could be a joint City/County park.
• Any part of the 135 acres which is not added to the park should be included as part of the County's new PDR plan which preserves the land for agricultural use (the Wetzel farm might be a good candidate for this). Otherwise, the land is currently zoned for 34 residential units an acre and development will be a repeat of Avon Street extended.

4. Surrounding land use

• This is a County issue, so it will require discussion with the BOS. The surrounding land use must be such as to not push the MCP, its intersections, or the downstream 250 bypass into a failing grade. It is important to note that the traffic projections on the MCP are driven by the allowable build-out in the immediate area - not the existing traffic load or desired build-out. (Park Street currently handles 24,000 cars a day. A goal should be to reduce this by half, which means that the MCP would have to handle 12,000 cars a day, plus whatever additional traffic is created in this corridor due to build-out in the County. If a two lane MCP, with 17 lane intersection cannot handle more than say 20,000 vehicles, without a failing grade, then build-out in the County in this corridor should not generate more than 8000 new vehicle trips, unless the County provides additional road infrastructure which does not go through the City.)
• Add coordinated lights at CATEC, DunLora, Catholic School (unsafe school crossing) and Stonehenge.

5. Traffic calming

• There must be immediate traffic calming on Park Street, north of the bypass (light at Melbourne, 4 way stops on North, Davis and Watson), with a goal of reducing traffic on Park St to 12,000 cars per day. If the parkway is built to carry 20,000 cars a day, and the traffic on Park St is reduced to 12,000 cars per day, there will be a net 33% increase in the throughput of this corridor (32,000 total as opposed to 24,000 total). Since the corridor is already very efficient from a traffic point of view (although unbearable from residents point of view) adding 33% more capacity might even be considered reckless, despite VDOT's insistence that it be increased by 200% (VDOT's numbers are based on the County building out to the potential allowed in its suburban growth area, which would create severe congestion problems in the City).
• There should be a hard number target of no more than 10,000 cars daily on any City neighborhood street, with volumes over 8,000 cars making the street automatically eligible for traffic calming measures.
• Traffic calming projects must be completed on other City streets as soon as possible. There are at least a dozen neighborhoods that are waiting for action by the City.

6. Transit and Ride Share

• The City and County must put some proposals on the table for increasing public transit. The current total budget for CTS is 1.5 million dollars a year. We should determine how much money it would take to decrease head times to 10-15 minutes on all routes, with later hours and expanded service, perhaps setting a 'not to exceed' number of 5 million dollars as a goal (note that we are currently spending 30 million a year on new road construction).
• Mobility downtown and along West Main St. is going to be a continuing challenge. We should implement a fare free zone, based on the Trolley route, ASAP.
• The City should continue to work with UVA to merge the CTS and UTS systems.
• We need to move forward with a light rail study, building on the suggestions from the 'Future of Light Rail' forum of July '99.
• The City should begin to study a demand response transit system, using smaller vehicles, possibly coordinated with the taxi providers (this would require some discussion with those providers), possibly privatized.
• Provide premium parking spaces for van pool and ride share vehicles
• The City should create a commission on alternative transportation, possibly with collaboration with the County and University. This could be done in conjunction with the transportation portion of the City's comprehensive plan.
• The City and County must create a transportation district, which will have taxing authority on gasoline. Money raised by this tax will go towards improving public transit. This will require County cooperation.

7. Other road improvements

• The MCP should be designed to handle a fixed number of cars, not the entire possible build out of the North East portion of the County.
• Continued population increase in the County must be met by new county roads (Eastern Connector, Southern Connector, 29 Bypass, etc) if it cannot be addressed with transit. Obviously, transit solutions need to be aggressively pursued. Given that the City is destroying a park to build a road for the County, the County must make a commitment to build the 29 bypass and Eastern connector, IF they are unable to limit growth in the region to no more than say 140,000 people in the Cville metropolitan area, or achieve traffic reduction to a comparable number. This will insure that the MCP does not become a 'stake through the City' as the region continues to grow.
• The MPO must endorse various rt 29 improvements including improving intersections, possibly with interchanges at Hydraulic, Greenbriar and Rio, removal of some lights, an eastern service road behind Kmart and Seminole Square, a commitment not to add additional traffic lights on rt 29.
• The possibility of a 29 expressway should be considered as a long term solution (using the conversion of highway 101 in Santa Barbara to an expressway as a model of how to do an attractive, small footprint, urban expressway).

8. Traffic reduction

• The City needs to take the lead on this, with traffic reduction programs, including van pooling for City employees, particularly those who work regular 8-4:30 hours. Model on State Farm program
• The Chamber of Commerce and CALEC must put forward a proposal to reduce dependency on the single occupancy vehicle, with business committing to provide incentives so that some additional percentage of the regional work force (say 5%) will be ridesharing, vanpooling, telecomuting, biking, walking, or using mass transit by the time that the parkway is actually opened (or else the Parkway will become a 'busses only' road).
• The City's transportation policy should be to replace existing parking demand with transit solutions.

(Kevin Lynch, July 26, 2000, electronic mail, )